As You Are
by Spazztic Revenge
Summary: I wanted to find you, somewhere in all of this. Within the smears and the scribbles and the passion and the pain. I wanted to find you like you were captured in some foreign land, lost amidst the stardust in a far off galaxy, or sucked inside the pages of a novel. But you were right here, breathing within my lungs, beating beneath my skin. You are a part of me. As you are.
1. man of mystery

**A/N: **

**Full Summary:**

**I wanted to find you, somewhere in all of this. Within the smears and the scribbles and the sticky notes and the voice mails and the passion and the pain. I wanted to find you like you were captured in some foreign land, lost amidst the stardust in a far off galaxy, or sucked inside the pages of a novel. But you were right here, breathing within my lungs, beating beneath my skin. You are a part of me.**

**As you always have been.**

**As you will be.**

**As you are.**

** _"I fell in love on a Tuesday in March watching a man fall in love with a story. I wonder what his name is, this beautiful person that laughs and cries with his whole heart. This person that makes me smile without even trying. This person that is a slave to the writings of a man that died decades ago. I envy his joy, his wonder that never fails to grow though the story never changes. I envy this book that holds his undivided attention as he cradles it so gently. _**

** _Who are you, man of mystery? _**

** _Man of my heart." _**

**Or an AU where (mostly) Yuuri tells the story of his and Viktor's journey in love (over and over again).**

**This is my submission to the Viktuuri Fluff Bang over on AO3 and on tumblr. It's been an honor to be a part of this event with the talents of so many writers and artists. I encourage everyone to check out the fics on the collection page on AO3 and the art over on tumblr. The participants and moderators put in a massive amount of effort and your support is well-deserved. Links will be posted on my tumblr and a link to that is in my profile. **

**I wanted to do something a little different with a bunch of trite AU ideas (bookstore au, artist au, writer au, soulmate au, reincarnation au) Let's see how it goes… Warnings for addressing issues of mental health and gender identity.**

**Let me know what you think!**

**Updates Wednesdays and Sundays.**

* * *

_Yuuri, when you first see me~_

_You find me drunk in the aisle of a bookstore. I'm reading the same book over and over again. You watch over the spines in a neighboring aisle as I giggle at the same jokes I've read over hundreds of times, as I yell at the protagonist for his unending stupidity, as I cry over the cliché ending where the love interest dies too soon. You watch as I close the book, hold it reverently to my chest, before I slip it back on the shelf and leave, a smile creasing my face and tears dripping from my jaw. _

_You see me, but you never say anything. _

_I wish you would. _

_You continue to watch me day after day, this bookworm that can't get enough of a story that drowns me in misery. You read your own books - mysteries, tragedies, romance - but mine is always the same. You grow curious, until one day you wait until I leave, go and read it for yourself. _

_I'm not there to see you. How you laugh and yell and cry. How you fall in love with the same book that I come back for day after day. _

_The next day I come back, but you aren't there. _

_You aren't there to see my surprise when I find the note hidden between chapter three and four, stuck right below the first line where the protagonist meets the love of his life. You don't see my smile as I whisper to myself what you wrote with the pen you keep tucked behind your ear. _

_"I fell in love on a Tuesday in March watching a man fall in love with a story. I wonder what his name is, this beautiful person that laughs and cries with his whole heart. This person that makes me smile without even trying. This person that is a slave to the writings of a man that died decades ago. I envy his joy, his wonder that never fails to grow though the story never changes. I envy this book that holds his undivided attention as he cradles it so gently. _

_Who are you, man of mystery?_

_Man of my heart."_

* * *

Viktor, when I first saw you~

I knew I could never look away. Even after you'd left, your book gently tucked to sleep and your spot on the floor grown cold, I still stare. I stare at that spot you've left empty like it's the picture of my heart, now empty without you in it. I don't know you. How can I feel this way, feel so much, without knowing who you are? I don't even know your name.

You come back. Again and Again. I imagine talking to you. I think about asking for your name. I think about talking about that book you keep in your shaking grasp. I think about asking you to look at me the way you look at those pages, with such endearing, tender warmth.

I don't. But my imagination overflows. Scenarios. Thoughts. I don't know what to do with them all so I write without care, without doubt or anxiety. A steady stream of thoughts flows from my pen to the pages that have sat empty before me for months.

I was going to give it up. I was going to give it all up.

And then, _bam_, it was like you came into my life, with just a laugh, a yell, a tear, and I could see myself again. I don't know if you noticed, but our eyes met, just once. I was passing by your aisle, trying to sneak a peek at you. You looked up, the briefest glance, and it was like I could breathe again. Your eyes fell back to your book and I tripped and fell head first into the non-fiction section.

I don't know how or why, but I have to know who you are, this person that sets my soul on fire.

I can't talk to you. Just the thought makes me shake so much that I have trouble scanning my customers' books. So I sit in your aisle, long after you're gone, and chew on the end of my pen until I get up the guts to write what I can.

It sounds stupid, childish, creepy. I want to crumple it up and throw it in the river. But I stop just shy of clenching my fist. This is what I've been doing with everything. Overthinking. Tossing away my ideas before they can possibly grow and flourish.

I read the book. It makes me laugh and yell and cry. I leave the note where I know you'll find it. I don't think about it. I slip it in and leave. Lock up for the night.

I don't see you find it. I don't see you read it. But I see you afterwards, with a spectacular smile and tears in your eyes. You stomp up to the counter and yell at me, "Why didn't you say anything?!" and I think that I did it. I managed to make you feel the way you do when you read that book.

"I did," I say, and it's the beginning of something real.

* * *

My shift ends and I stare at you. You smirk when you notice. It makes my face burn, especially when you push errant strands of your long, silver hair back with the tips of your fingers. It exposes more of your face, an ear, a patch of your wrist as your sleeve droops with the movement. There's a splatter of green there, just below the twist of your veins. I take the time to look you over again. There are colors all over you, smudges of pink on your shoes, a smear of blue on the seam of your shirt. Some of the colors are old, faded from obvious washes. The one on your wrist is fresh.

"You paint?" I ask, my voice an octave higher than it should be because you've been staring at me silently for such a long time. It was your idea to do this. To sit across from each other at the bookstore's café and talk. My fingers fiddle with the sleeve on my cappuccino, looking for something to do other than scratch my rising nervousness into my skin. Maybe you just want to mock me. Maybe this is your idea of a joke, make this weirdo that's been stalking you uncomfortable until you laugh as you leave and go on with your life.

"Sometimes," you say and you shrug. Your eyes trace over me and I follow your gaze from the pen behind my ear to my little notebook in the breast pocket of my uniform to the smeared words on my own wrist. "You write."

It sounds so simple coming from your mouth. Like it's a hobby and not my job, my life's goal. Like it's not what I agonize over every waking hour that I'm not at this bookstore.

"Sometimes," I say and I cringe, because that's lie.

"I'll show you mine if you show me yours." Before I can reply, you dig into your satchel that dangles carelessly off the back of your chair. You pull out a sketchbook that's coated in grey smears and colored fingerprints and slide it over to my side. The table seems elongated in that moment until the book stops a centimeter shy of the table's edge. I don't move. I stare down at your sketchbook even as you reach over to burrow into my own bag and dig up my notebook that's battered and torn from my war with words. Then you sit back and read.

I want to scream. I want to snatch back my book and run away. Far away. Nobody sees my writing. Not my family, not my friends. Not since I was in the creative writing club in high school. How can you do such a thing? How can you invade a stranger's privacy like it's nothing?

My hands move. Instead of ripping my notebook from your grip, they peel open your sketch book's cover.

Just like that moment when I saw you and knew that my life could never be the same, I look at your sketches and can't help but gape. Ranging from still lifes to portraits to cartoonish sketches to masterpieces that draw from an outrageous imagination, I'm captivated. 'Sometimes,' you said, but this isn't the art of someone who _sometimes _paints. This is an artist's work.

My heart beats in my ears, thunderous and booming, as I stare at a small sketch, down in the corner of one of your pages. It's a sketch of myself. I'm sitting at the table in the corner where I first saw you. A pen is in my mouth, craters being nibbled into the cap as I stare down at my notebook. Nothing around me rouses my attention. Not the baby crying in the background, not the fellow employee that is knocking on my table to stir some awareness. All my concentration is there, on the page, eyes glaring down and glasses slipping down my nose. You captured everything about me in one image, even the tag that sticks out of the back of my shirt like it _always _does, and I gape up at you like you hold my very soul in the pencil you have clipped to the strap of your black overalls.

You're looking at me, too. But you're crying. There are quiet trails of tears on your cheeks, dripping down from your jaw and into your lap. I look down at my notebook and you have it open to the moment that changed my life. Both of our lives, I suspect. I wrote about you with unfiltered thought and it makes my nerves fritz and coil until I'm so tense, so embarrassed that I can't move.

"You really saw me," you whisper, wiping away your tears with your sleeve as you smile like the sun as it finally peeks through winter. I could say the same thing, but I don't. "I'm Viktor."

"Yuuri." It's all I can say. No 'nice to meet you.' No 'please don't leave my sight. Ever. Because once you do, I feel like I won't know who I am anymore.'

I don't say any of it. I don't have to.

Your eyes light up like bottle rockets taking off.

I know I can't go back. I can't just be that bookstore manager that sits in the back corner failing at being a novelist. You can't just be the customer that comes in for one book and one book only.

There is no longer me and you.

There is us.

* * *

Our official first date is at an arcade like we're thirteen. We spend the first hour beating each other up through pixelated characters and annihilating zombies with our toy guns. We spend an hour at the claw machine. I win you this tiny, poorly-stitched penguin. It's ugly, the way its eyes aren't even symmetrical and one of its wings is stunted, but you say that it's your favorite. With the way you fawn over it, I begin to think that it's my favorite, too.

We take pictures crammed in the little photo booth near the back. Being so close to you makes my heart pitter patter and I can feel it in my face. You waste no time getting closer. You kiss my cheek and there's a flash. You can't stop laughing through the rest of the pictures. Somehow, neither can I.

You pay for dinner, two Sprites and a share-sized Skittles. A grade-schooler's dream. You suck on the green skittles until your tongue matches. You stick it out, going cross-eyed to look down at it. "It needs purple," you announce, "and some red." You continue until your tongue is another one of your masterpieces. You're pretty sure that you've created a new flavor.

I kiss you to see if I can taste it.

Our second date is more civilized, a nice place I take my parents to when they visit. I like to keep up the illusion that I'm not broke. I don't think they ever buy it.

You don't either, but you play along.

"So how does one act in a place like this?" you ask, your voice tinged with some high and mighty tone that makes me snort. You pick up your glass of wine, one pinky poised in the air, and take a dainty sip. "_Ah_. Tastes like the fresh tears of my enemies and the blood of my mistresses' aborted babies."

Or you don't.

"Okay, so maybe this was a stupid idea."

You stop and give me a fond look. "Not stupid, I enjoy a night out like any other lady being wooed by her suitor. But really, Yuuri, don't act so stuffy. It doesn't suit you." You reach across the table to loosen my tie. It's an excuse you use to pull me in for a kiss. The couple at the table next to us pause in their conversation as they glance disdainfully in our direction. You sit back and look over at them as you kick up your feet on the table. "I'm sorry. Is there something on my face?"

We continue and our conversation lightens. We talk about everything and nothing.

"Eggplant."

"Whose favorite food is eggplant? Seriously."

I don't answer. Mostly because mine is, obviously, but also because you do this thing with the edges of your hair before you tuck it behind your ear and I'm entranced. The way the sheen of your silver hair catches in the lamplight, the way the action opens your face fully to my view. And the fluid movement of your wrist… If I ever doubted that you were an artist, those doubts are gently brushed away with the grace of your fingers. Even the way you hold your fork, delicately balanced between your fingers, poised at your lips… I can imagine you with a paintbrush in the same position. I can imagine the spine of the brush in your hands, held like something dear, and the end of it weighted on your lip as you think upon your blank slate. I can imagine the look of concentration on your face, ice-blue eyes beckoning for the sweet relief of an epiphany.

"What's yours, then?"

"Hmmm, I don't have a favorite food. A flavor, though."

"And what's that?" I ask before I swirl my fettucine on my fork and take a bite.

"The taste of your tongue."

I choke. Hard. My fork clatters to my plate and it draws the attention of the other table again. I try to cover my coughs with a napkin and grimace in their direction as some form of apology.

You don't let up. I daresay you rather enjoy the attention. "It makes me wonder what other parts of you taste like."

My embarrassment doesn't compete with the disgusted faces of the couple beside us. You smile and wave at them. My choking turns to laughter.

* * *

We don't officially move in together until I'm already practically living at your place. I haven't been back home in days, weeks probably. It doesn't help that my roommate's girlfriend just moved in. They're both obnoxious, stuff everywhere. Socks on the counter, soaked towels molding the floorboards, and dishes piled into mountains on the sink. I can't think in that environment.

Your place isn't much better. I like to think of you as a whirlwind. You came into my life, turned me upside down and left me spinning. Your place is a whirlwind's place. Your paints are scattered underfoot. You have canvases and various ideas drawn on every surface. When you're suddenly struck with an idea, you stop and race to draw it, leaving whatever you were in the middle of, half-folded laundry, half-washed dishes, a half-finished kiss with your boyfriend.

It's complete chaos at your place, yet I love it. I love all of it because it's you. And somehow, just looking at you gives me a running start.

I study you in profile. Your face is reflected in the dirty window, the glass covered in finger smudges and dust. The world is in front of you, there, always present. It's dirty and grey but you love it, this world, this city. I can see it in your eyes: your admiration, that spark. You soak it up and let it all free on canvas like it's easy. I envy that. It takes me hours to write a sentence, sometimes. But you never let anything like time or pressure or lack of inspiration hold you back. The world sparkles before you, and you effortlessly capture it so the rest of us can see what you see.

I want to be like you.

Sometimes I think that it's you that I write for. My muse. My inspiration.

You make me see that I am a writer. That my stories have meaning. My words are mine alone and they speak what others don't see, don't hear, don't know.

I'm not just a deadbeat writer that will never be published. I won't be found dead on a bench somewhere, nothing but pocket change to my name and an empty bottle in my possession.

With you I feel like I can take on the world. There are so many possibilities. I can be someone. I can face the world. I can hand it my stories and not be scoffed at or hated or ignored.

As I watch you smile to yourself, satisfied with the spray of navy and mauve that make up the foundation of our neighboring building now splattered on canvas, I think that all of those possibilities are only possible with you at my side.

I am nothing without you.

I quiver at the thought.

But I am suddenly able to write.

* * *

We've been together for two months, but in my heart it feels like it's been years. I'm already living with you. You dominate the words scattered across my pages. My writing hasn't gotten any better, but it's more frequent, more focused. I'm thinking of submitting what I've got when I hit a wall.

"So, you're Viktor's new squeeze," your agent says once you're out of earshot.

We're at one of your gallery openings and I'm out of my depth. I'm a writer that has never once been published. I don't belong here, with an artist that's beautiful and talented and successful. It didn't hit me until now, standing in between two of your most recent pieces, your touch quickly evaporating from my palm as you talk to two (what are they? customers? viewers?) people about the portrait you drew three Saturdays ago. You're a professional. You're known.

I don't belong here.

In this world.

Where your agent is insulting me.

"Excuse me?" It's the first time he's spoken to me since you introduced us. It leaves a foul taste in my mouth.

"It won't last," he says like it's nothing. Like I'm nothing, a fly being swiped off of his windshield. He sneers at me, then looks over at you, perfect, shining Viktor. He looks at you like I look at you. I don't like it. "When did you two meet? Three- Four months ago?"

"Two…" It sounds so small, such a short amount of time, but the time is not indicative of the depth of our relationship. Still, the one syllable out of my mouth makes my shoulders hunch.

He laughs. "And you're already living together. Same old Viktor. He's as quick as ever. But, you know, it's usually over quicker than it started."

"How would you know?" I grit my teeth as his eyes travel over you, undressing you and something inside of me boils. I walk in front of him, blocking his view, standing there as intimidating as I know how. "Don't talk about Viktor like you know his heart." It's mine, I want to say, but he snatches your heart right out of my hands before I can brand my name into it.

"Because we were together, once upon a time. I couldn't keep ahold of him. Nobody can. He's like a bird constantly taking flight. You try to hold on, but all you come back with are feathers." He downs a flute of champagne and sets it on a table to the side. He puts his hands in his pockets, shoulders back, relaxed, but his eyes are sad. "He'll leave you in one way or another. To another city. To another bed. Viktor's consistent like that. Trust me," he winks and I want to throw up, "I've known him for a long time."

I leave without saying anything. I catch a cab and the world spins outside of my window. I can't think. I can't speak. We're supposed to be soul mates. Isn't that what you said? In a breathless whisper mere minutes after we'd fallen into bed together after our second date? I know that it was fast, every fiber in my being said that we were moving too fast, two cars speeding together towards a cliff, but I love you. I loved you. Is this what you do with everyone? Is this how it always is?

When I reach our place, I scratch out everything, all of my words. Every thought is balled up and hurled out the window. I can't read any of it, this fairy tale life built on lies. I'm two seconds from shredding my notebook into ribbons when I hear the door slam.

"He told you, didn't he?"

I turn around, my face a disgusting mess, and see you standing there. You're gulping in breaths, chest heaving. Your careful braid is now broken apart, hair scraggled around your face that is white with fear. Your cheeks are bright from exertion. And shame. You look nothing like the professional you were an hour ago.

"Did you run here?"

You shake your head, whipping your hair back and forth as you pace towards me. I don't have it in me to withdraw from you as you hold my cheeks in your hands. For a minute, I give in to the sensation. I feel cradled, protected, kept. "It doesn't matter," you insist, and it snaps me back. "Nothing matters except that I love you."

Before, I would have given anything to hear that out of your mouth. I would have believed you. But now… I realize how little that love is built upon. Art. A bookstore. Your apartment. I barely know you. I've never met your family or your friends. I only just met your agent and found out that he's your ex-lover. Two months. I don't even know why you're an artist, what compels you to paint. I say it out loud and it's like I've physically stricken you. A backhand to the face that came out of left field.

"I don't know who you are."

You fall back on your heels, hands leaving me and my mind is clearer, but I'm cold. I stare at you, so beautiful, so full of life. Your art looks like your soul, a mirror. I'm not. I'm a direct contrast. My plain, ordinary looks. My soft, pudgy body. My lack of confidence and anxiety-ridden thoughts. My stories that are hidden in drawers or flushed down the toilet.

"It's okay," I say. "I don't deserve you." I feel the tears as they trail my cheeks and I feel even worse about all of this. You are so strong, and here I am crying about something that should have been obvious from the start.

Maybe it was all a lie. I didn't really see you that day. Maybe I never really saw you.

Then you're hugging me. You swallow me up in your arms and you say something that I never even thought of. "So let's start over. I'm Viktor. I'm an artist who paints because it's the only way that I can get my emotions out. It's how I communicate. It's how I live." You withdraw, but your arms don't leave me. Your forehead rests down on my own. "I can never stop. Just like I can never stop loving you."

There it is. That connection. I feel like we're two halves of a whole. I don't know a thing about art, but that is exactly how I feel about my writing. It's exactly how I feel about you.

I sniff back everything, the tears, the snot, the conversation with your agent, this entire night, and smile.

"I'm Yuuri."


	2. I feel real

I'm having the worst time writing, banging my head on my desk as I try to stop myself from writing the same word for a fifth time. "I can't do this," I whisper to myself.

You're reading a magazine, but you pause mid-flip. "Then stop."

"You did not just tell me to quit writing," I scoff. "It's like air. I can't even breathe-"

"Okay, okay, not the air spiel again." You stand up, your fashion magazine slipping from your lap and splatting on the ground. You come up behind me and rest across my shoulders, eyes looking down at my wreck of a page. "I'm not telling you to quit forever. Just take, _hah_, just take a breather. And I don't just mean that metaphorically, like you do."

"What?"

"Step away for a bit. Take a break. Let's go do something. Go to that new European bistro that opened up on 5th. Or I know how much you love Phantom of the Opera. We could go see it at the theatre. We could go ice skating in Central Park. You said that you would teach me. Or, hey, let's go to the bookstore."

"My bookstore?" I ask with a snort.

"Yes, _your _bookstore. It's the place where we fell in love. It's bound to help you come up with something. The magic of love does that to people."

It's a tempting offer, a day with you. I've enjoyed all of the time we've spent together since we decided to slow down and get to know each other better. "No. I've been in slumps before. The best way to get out of them is to just push through them. The words will come to me, I just have to force them out."

"That sounds…" You pout and step to the side. Your hip rests on the side of my desk as you try to close my notebook. Key word: try.

I slam the cover back open. "Horrible. Like pulling teeth, but instead I'm yanking out words from my brain."

"Well, what I do when I can't come up with anything is walk away. I go do something like shopping or make dinner or traipse around town."

"How does that help?"

"I've planted the seed. In my head, it's there. The form, or concept, or some shapeless image. While I'm out and about, I let the seed grow. It comes to me, sometimes in a great _BANG_," you throw out your arms, but then let them down and the modern kimono you're wearing falls to your inner elbows, hanging off of you like drooping wings, "and sometimes little by little."

I haven't asked you about your fashion choices. Some days, you wear the most feminine things. You wear skirts like its natural and with how long your legs are you could almost fool me into thinking that it is. Sometimes you spend hours trying to curl your hair just right and you enjoy how it bounces as we walk together. And then some days, it's like you're a different person, your hair pulled back and you're wearing slacks and trench coats that accentuate your very obvious male physique.

I don't know how to ask the question, so I don't.

It feels like we're still finding each other. Still learning how to talk, how to see.

"I don't like relying on inspiration," I say, scrunching up my nose as I do little to hide my contempt. "It's a fickle wench."

"That she is, but sometimes all the mind needs is air. I don't think it's relying on inspiration so much as it is creating it for yourself. Besides, if you pluck at that pretty little mind of yours any more," bending forward, you kiss my forehead and I feel the glossy imprint you leave behind, "you'll drive yourself nuts."

* * *

You come home late one night from a meeting. I'm cleaning the inside of the oven because I've already cleaned everything else. I've spent the afternoon trying to keep my mind off of what you could be doing with that asshole of an agent of yours. You both speak French, that romantic language that leaves your tongue with a purr. It's like you both have your own language when you're together and this knot-in-my-stomach feeling is worse, so much worse than it was that day in the gallery. You were speaking it when he called, before you were leaving out the door with a half-hearted "Meeting with my agent, Yuuri!" and then back to French when the door slipped shut.

"The place is sparkling, Yuuri. Did you- Did you arrange my brushes by type?"

You sound impressed and I hate the way it makes my anger soften. "By type, then size."

I feel your hand on my back, nails scratching between my shoulder blades. "Why don't you climb out of that grimy oven and let me say a proper hello?"

I huff, but I do as asked. I toss down the blackened sponge and listen to the oven door creak as it's relieved of my weight. Greeted with a quick kiss, I'm thrown off balance, mentally and physically. Your hand supports the small of my back, keeping me standing. You hand me a coffee with a little heart made out of foam. I can't help but smile and it's infuriating because I want to be mad, _need _to be mad, but you make my heart melt like the one in my cappuccino.

I swear it's not fair.

"You cleaned the entire apartment, yet there's no dinner? What kind of housewife are you?" you tease, but I pinch you in the side anyway.

"We're out of food, jerk. It was your turn to go shopping."

"Well, better late than never." You circle my arm in yours and begin to head out.

"Wait! Viktor! I'm covered in dirt. I need shoes. Wait. Why do I have to come with you?!" My words don't seem to pierce your ears as you pull me along. Into your galaxy. Into your orbit. Like always.

It was your idea to go out shopping so late, but you're exhausted. You're still as bright and happy as ever, but I can see the wear in the crinkle of your eyes, in the tightness of your smile. You're barely standing when we make it to the entrance. You're too tired to walk, to notice how I slip from your side to grab a cart.

"Your chariot awaits," I say as I peel in front of you with the grocery cart.

You laugh and your eyes are sparkling as you take my hand and climb in.

No one says anything, though I don't miss the glares and looks as people pass by. You notice, too, but you don't pay them any mind. You don't care. You never do. It's your best quality, I think to myself as you chew on the licorice hanging between your lips, making grabby hands at a box of cheese crackers just out of reach. You are so true to yourself, so unashamed, so free. It makes me jealous, but it chases away the dark, brooding feeling that's expanded with every breath since you left earlier. I love you. No matter what you do, I don't think that feeling will fade.

Your agent can go to hell, I think, as I heave a breath and push you around the corner to the meat section.

Neither of us have it in us to cook, so we pick up a pizza and call the night quits. You grabbed a bottle of champagne at the store, "To celebrate," you said.

"To celebrate what?"

"Being in love."

"You are way too cheesy," I say, laughing as the champagne bubbles tickle my throat. You snap open the pop tab on your soda, pouring it into your glass. "You're the only person I know that mixes their champagne with coke."

You take a long sip, making an obnoxious slurping sound as if making a point and some of your drink escapes to slide down your chin. "Ugh, aren't I just a princess?" You use your sleeve, coated in a spray of bright blue, to brush it away.

We're sitting on the fire escape, breathing in the night as we feast on a box of greasy pizza between us. It's uncomfortable, the bars digging into my backside as the brick wall behind me scratches into my back. There's the loud blare of a car being towed from the alley. People are yelling on the street, a fistfight breaking out. It smells like the dumpster four floors below, all of the building's garbage decomposing beneath my nose. But in this moment, I can't imagine being anywhere else.

It makes me think of my parents, oddly enough. I can feel it between us, love in its purest form, just like my parents have. They are always my shining example. Growing up, I could see it in the way they were with each other, in their every action, and I knew that that was the kind of love that I wanted.

"My parents were friends first," I say out of the blue, munching on a piece of crust in the back corner of my mouth. "Got to know each other over years. Counted on each other. Knew each other like the backs of their hands." I look at you, knowing that this is the same gaze that my parents have.

You stiffen, and I think that I've hit a rock while digging into some part of you. There's a twist to your mouth as you look out down the street. "My parents didn't know each other. Their marriage was arranged, children of company heads, you know. You can just look at them and tell that they've hated each other since the day that they met."

It doesn't take you long before you change the subject.

We share the last piece of pizza, split it right down the middle where you get most of the cheese and I have the bulk of the crust. You're explaining the art of graffiti to me as we look out at the images illegally splattered across neighboring buildings and billboards. Your tone is a touch too nonchalant, but I know how much the topic excites you as you talk about the rawness, the realness of the soul reflected on a surface all too temporary.

You point to a wall of the building diagonal to us. It's smeared with names that I can't hope to read and illuminated by the orange glare of a streetlamp. I have to crane my neck at a painful angle to see it. "What do you think of that one?" you ask with a mischievous look in your eyes.

"How did they get up there?" is the first thing that I wonder aloud, gazing at a blob three quarters of the way to the roof.

There's a startle of laughter from your direction, half-caught between your nose and your mouth and it slots realization into the oblivious space in my mind.

I tug my glasses closer to my face, squinting my eyes as much as I can until my eyelashes cloud my periphery. The art is of a person, androgynous in appearance with a face too soulful and haunting to be made of paint and stone. Their hair is a jumble of words, clumped together and bursting from their head like a mushroom cloud after disaster. The words are all derogatory. They are hatred spewed from other people's lips, past haunts, and some of the words are sharp-toothed thoughts born from a deeply ingrained self-loathing.

It's a beautifully done and deeply moving piece. I don't even know how to describe how connected I feel to it.

I don't have to.

There are lines next to it that read like an excerpt from some well-known author you would see on a quote-of–the-day calendar. But they're my words, far from well-known, far from perfect.

"**The mirror speaks in ways we cannot define.**

**It speaks words that are in our hearts, our minds. **

**I want to reach out and scramble them up, redefine. **

**These words that used to be yours, but now are mine."**

The words stare back at me, stabbing and reaching into me with the same emotion that I felt when I wrote them so long ago. The entire piece touches a deep place inside of me that I have to become reacquainted with. "H-How did you get up there?" is what cracks out of my throat. My amazement is hidden somewhere in the searing burn behind my eyes.

"I know someone." You shrug like pride isn't held high in your cheeks. "A rising, angry little street artist that's not as good as Banksy, but who is?"

"You," I answer. You roll your eyes, but I'm being honest. No artist stirs my soul like you do, not even the 'greats' that you compare yourself to. I want to hug you and kiss you and touch you. I want to cry and scream. I want to write with all of the passion that I've been missing.

You drink the last of your glass, then chug down the rest of the bottle until it clinks against your teeth. You mutter about needing more alcohol, scurry back through the window and I can hear you rummaging in the cupboards. I'm trying to compose myself when I hear you, muffled and quiet, "You aren't mad?"

I understand the question, the uncertainty in your voice. I can't get up the guts to show anyone my words, but now there they are, set on stone in front of the world's eyes. I wasn't asked, wasn't told. You did this all yourself, but that's why I can't feel anything but moved.

I feel real.

"No," I say, taking your hand as you settle back down next to me, a bottle of vodka in your other paint-smeared hand that matches the colors of the wall. It's recent, this art. I thought you were with that man all day. I soaked the house in bleach trying to cleanse it with my thoughts, but you weren't with him. You were out here, right outside of our window, mixing our mediums, thinking of me. "I love it."

You get horribly smashed. I've learned to temper my drinking after too many drunken escapades, so I get off pretty clean. Well, actually, clean may be the wrong word.

You're pouring yourself the umpteenth shot (while I'm attempting to wrestle the bottle away and you smack me in the forehead while aiming for my hand) when inspiration strikes. My mind repeats your words, because your face changes as if a 'great _BANG_' has happened.

You're a mess. Your painting is a mess and I can't tell if that's your soul or the alcohol talking. You whip your brush around in messy arcs. The paint hits everything, bursting across our furniture more than it does your canvas. You look like you've gotten into a paintball fight by the time your sigh sounds of completion. I'm sure I don't look much better. I'm reminded of that scene from the movie _Hook_, where the lost boys are covered in colorful, but imaginary food.

What a way to stay young at heart.

You kiss me with the force of a tornado, my whirlwind. You don't stop kissing me, but I walk us carefully to the bathroom and reach around you to fill the tub. We fall in, clothes and all, and stay there until the water changes with the colors of inspiration and puddles over the linoleum.

I wake up before you. We're in a tangle on the couch, your foot in my face and my lower half making its way to the floor. The apartment looks like we've murdered a rainbow, but I can hear your laughter echoing off of the walls and my feelings of agitation slip away.

Your expression is serene, so elegant even in sleep, but I'm reminded of the face on the building across from us. Your face. Mine. I wipe some of your long strands of hair off of your eyebrow and push them behind your ear. I can't manage the same smooth movement with my wrist as you do, but I can see you again.

You're grumpy when you wake up. You whine about elephants in your head, telling me to make them go away. Your grumbling ceases when I make it over to you, helping you sit up and handing you some meds along with your favorite hangover food, greasy, fast food tacos and a Slurpee mix of 6 flavors. You smile so brightly that I can imagine how your cheeks hurt. Or maybe that's my pain, my smile.

* * *

I feel alienated from you, sometimes. Right now, for instance. When you stand back to unveil a picture that you've spent the past three days restlessly working on: A car, casual in its speed as it drives down a long stretch of road amongst the sun and fallen leaves. You're looking at me and waiting for some form of reaction, some criticism or praise.

I don't know what to say.

Your art makes me feel things instantly. My fingertips quiver.

Your picture inspires me. I see it and I'm there. I could write it as if you're next to me. We're driving in some car that I don't own and for the life of me couldn't park in this city. You're in the passenger seat, staring out with the passion of wanderlust dusting the tops of your cheeks. The road is freckled with leaves. The trees are burning in the fiery light of sunset and it lingers in your eyes. The wind whooshes through your window and whips your hair in your face. You growl, muttering that your hair is outrageously long.

"You love it," I respond.

You don't deny it.

You stretch your impossibly long arms up, gathering silver strands between impossibly long fingers. You snap your hair tie into place and gaze back out like you never stopped. Silence reigns again. That and the whoosh of the air and the crackling of leaves as they clatter in the chaos of the autumn wind. A leaf, so mellow in its journey, floats up, burgundy and patched with holes that the dying rays of light shine through. It caresses your cheek in its ascent. The whisper of a kiss.

You smile like it's renewed your energy, brought you a sense of adventure. You let your hand float outside the car window, like a leaf on its own journey, just as you've always been.

I stare, awed.

A small part of me can't help but wonder when it will be that you leave me. When will the wind finally pick up and whisk you away on your next adventure?

You snap your fingers in my face. "Well?" you ask and I'm momentarily perplexed.

Oh, right. The painting. "It's gorgeous," I say.

You give that same noise caught halfway in your throat sound when you're dissatisfied with my answer. It's not detailed enough. Not knowledgeable in the verbalization of the skills you've applied.

Not satisfying.

_When will it be? _

The thought haunts me.

Along with your painting.

* * *

There are times when our connection feels tangible, touchable between us. But there are times when I feel like we're raindrops, falling in the same direction, so close together, but too far apart and by the time we come together we're already broken and shattered across the pavement.

We are not perfect people.

We know this, and most days it doesn't matter.

I know about the time that you stood on the walkway of the Manhattan Bridge, climbed the fence, and contemplated trying to fly, knowing that you would only fall.

You know about the days that I don't leave the house because the world is HUGE and INTIMIDATING and SCARY.

Today it matters. My anxiety is at its highest. Usually it comes and goes, like fumes of pollution traveling through me. Today it's like a virus has gotten in, spreading diseased thoughts that I can't dispel no matter what I do. It's debilitating. It feels fatal.

You know about this, my anxiety. You know, but I don't think you understand. You find me in a ball on the couch, pages scattered around me and I've gone glassy-eyed, staring for hours at the same speck of green on the wall.

"Yuuri," you say and I flinch. You look at me like I'm a kicked puppy deserving of pity. It makes me curl up more. You try to untangle me, tugging at my arms, but I don't budge. So instead you sit beside me, staring down at me. There's disappointment in your eyes. I look at my hands instead. "What happened?"

The tears come because that's just it. Nothing really happened. There's no reason for me to be this way, frozen on the couch and trembling. There's no reason for me to feel this way, like no matter what I do, no matter what I say, everything is falling apart. I can't move, can't breathe-

Your hand touches my shoulder, but you're unsure of its placement. You stare at it, at me, like you don't know if you're being reassuring or if you've just triggered a bomb. "I… I, um," you say, lost, but you take a breath. "Tell me what's wrong. How can I help?"

I shake my head. I try to will away the tears and stop my trembling, but it gets worse. It's out of my control and I don't know how to help myself. How am I supposed to know what you can do?

"I always feel so stupid." I sound angry, spitting out words. I don't mean to. "I feel like I don't _deserve_ to feel this way. There are people who have been through things, had tough lives, been traumatized, but me… I grew up loved. I never-!" I sniff back my tears, wiping my sleeve beneath my nose, and push away the evidence of how weak and stupid I am.

You're still looking at me, but there's a clarity to your gaze now, your grip tightening on my shoulder. "Yuuri… You don't have to justify yourself. Not to me. Not to yourself. You don't… You don't have to go through something horrible to earn these emotions. Sometimes, you can't help-"

"But I _feel _like I don't have the right to feel this way!" You jump and your hand slips from me. It's not what I want. I want your hand, your touch. I want you beside me, always. "I feel like I don't have a right to be anxious or a right to lock myself in my room or a right to want to just…"

I can't stand it. I can't stand myself. I sound whiny and childish and I must look like the most pathetic person you've ever seen. I don't deserve you. I don't deserve anyone.

You sit back into the couch, tucking your legs beneath yourself, and drape yourself over me. You put your arms around me and it soothes the ache in a way that I can't explain. It doesn't make everything better. It doesn't fix anything.

It doesn't have to.

"Just hold me," I whisper.

You do. We sit like this, time an irrelevant factor, and you whisper back, "You are so amazing. The things that you write. The kind and gentle person that you are. The way you love me. I know that saying this probably won't change how you see yourself, but to me," there's a brush of lips on the curled skin of my ear as you sigh, "you are a titan, Yuuri."

I can almost believe it.

* * *

Our love isn't perfect.

I'm walking home with an old classmate from school. It wasn't planned. She was a customer at my bookstore, talked with me during breaks, and clumsily asked me to walk her home after my shift.

The Chihoko in my memory is the same as the one at my side, kind and soft-spoken with warm eyes. She was the one that would give me a copy of her notes when I was absent. She offered me half of her lunch when I would forget my own. I used to think that I was taking advantage of her kindness, and I say so as I scratch my cheek.

She laughs it off with a, "I wanted to do it for you." We walk close enough to brush arms. She's stopped apologizing for it.

She's giggling into a gloved hand at some stupid joke that I made and bumps against me again. Then you're in front of us, your lips thin and I can see you analyzing the space between me and her. You waste no time introducing yourself.

You walk right up to us, no shame in the sway of your hips. "I'm Viktor. Yuuri's roommate." You insert yourself between us with a vicious smile, hugging my arm to you.

Splotches of embarrassment appear on her cheeks, her eyes wide behind delicate frames. She coughs, quickly squeaking out her own introduction and an excuse that she must be going. She turns tail and almost bowls over a couple behind us. "I'm so sorry!" she says to them, and then to us with a bow, before practically sprinting away.

The whole scene makes your grin widen.

"You're jealous," I note.

"You're damn right. Skanky hoe better keep her little mittens to herself."

I laugh the entire way home.

It's funny.

Because don't you know?

You're the only person that I see.

The only star in my sky.

"I don't know why you're laughing," you pout, but you look like you just won a boxing match.

Maybe I should take your jealousy to heart, see the deeper side of things.

You question whether I love you constantly. Sometimes it takes me hours just to convince you, and many times I wonder whether or not I really have. But this is my fault, I find myself thinking. Maybe I need to be more upfront with my emotions, not hide the things that I think you'll turn away from. But I'm ugly inside here. When you see that, you'll leave, I know it.

It's those thoughts that keep me from saying anything when I catch you in my things. You rifle through my drawers, desperate to find something that isn't there. You flip through the files in my phone when you think I'm not paying attention. When I spend too much time writing, you doodle on my papers. I can't tell if you're trying to force yourself into my space, remind me that you're there, or if this is your vindictive way of getting back at me for not paying you enough attention.

I don't know who's at fault for this.

I'm sure that it's me. I need to tell you my thoughts more, believe that there is nothing I can tell you that will make you leave, just as you've said. I should be a better boyfriend. A better person.

But we're both still finding each other, walking this unsteady path side by side. It's a journey that doesn't seem to be ending any time soon, but I do figure one thing out.

We are not perfect people and our love isn't perfect, but I will never stop thinking that we are perfect for each other.


	3. For as long as I love you

**A/N: Art! There is art for this fic! Find it on my tumblr. The link is on my profile. *Screams at FFN for not allowing hyperlinks and image inserts*  
**

**Thank you to Jo for creating the gorgeous art for this. I'm still swooning. I don't think I can stop... **

**Help? **

**No, seriously, you are awesome, partner. Your art has such a style and personality that it is as unforgettable as it is amazing. Great, great work.**

* * *

You come home from a lunch with your parents and the dark look on your face tells me that it didn't go well. The slamming of the door as you entered our apartment was a big clue, too.

"Art is a hobby, not a career," you mutter to yourself and I know whose mouth those words originated from. I'm well-versed in the pain such a stabbing phrase can inflict. I've often had dark thoughts about my writing that ran along the same vein.

"I take it that your meeting didn't go well?" I set down my calculator on the arm of the couch. I can crunch the bookstore's numbers later. Much later, judging by the look you give me.

You flounce down in front of me, pushing yourself between my legs and nuzzle your nose into my knee. It's the signal you give me to work out the knots bunching in your shoulders. I set to work, kneading against the stress that your parents have placed there.

"They spent most of the time grousing at me for living like this," you begin, gesturing at our life together with a whip of your hand, "in the lower east side in an eight hundred dollar a month apartment with a boy, as if I should be ashamed. It's 'dangerous and distasteful,' my mom says, like her screwing her assistant isn't. Gah, she's such a hypocrite. It's been a year since I've seen them and it's the same as ever. Dad speaks as if he's on repeat. Get a respectable job, Viktor. Live with some sense of dignity, Viktor. Cut your hair, Viktor. You have a dick, Viktor, act like it. Hah, don't they realize that I wore my most expensive Jimmy Choos just to spite them? Well, not just…" You look down at your boots and glower at them before kicking them off. They clatter into the corner.

I dig my palm into a twist of muscle and you groan. My hands are on a search and destroy mission, seeking to do anything I can for you, even if it's only a massage. My mind is stuck. Something you said struck a chord. The note resonates through my mind, doesn't stop.

_-in the lower east side in an eight hundred dollar a month apartment with a boy._

_-with a boy._

"They had to call me now, of all times. Don't they see that I'm a success? I'm all anyone's talking about right now, but all they can do is pick at my lifestyle. Sorry I didn't turn into a trust fund baby, born to breathe business and finance and salivating over their positions. I happen to like my life, thank you very much."

It's still ringing in my ears. When your anger begins to shrivel, the question slips from me. "Why do you?"

You're playing with your hair, angrily tugging at a tangle. "Why do I what?"

"Why do you live in the lower east side in an eight hundred dollar a month apartment with a boy?"

I wish I could see your face, but your voice holds little hesitation. "This is where I struck out on my own. This is what it was like before I became popular and I like it. I feel like I'm myself here. Anywhere else wouldn't be me, you know? This place holds my fire, my blood. This is me. I don't need a fancy high-rise or a driver or an assistant. Although, I swear I'll get that Cadillac someday."

You look towards a picture from a magazine that's pinned to the living room wall, just one of the many pages wallpapering the place. It's a bright pink Cadillac that you blow a kiss towards. I smile at it. It's so you, but you're never going to get it if you keep buying outlandishly priced things like Jimmy Choos. Successful or not, I've seen your credit card statements…

"As for the boy." You turn around in my hands. You pull them to your lips, kissing the spirals of my knuckles. The ringing stops. "You are my most precious person. My parents can slander me all they want, nobody is taking you away from me. I don't know what I would do if I couldn't watch you write anymore."

"I'm sure it's just enthralling."

"Don't joke," you start as you nip at my finger. "It's true. You don't even know."

I bite the inside of my cheek, betting that I do. "I love watching you arting."

"It's hard to believe that you're a writer sometimes."

"More like all of the time."

"Okay. Okay." You bounce up, yanking me up with you. "Enough with this depressing topic. Let's go out! I want to do something."

I hesitate. "…A friend of mine is playing a gig at a bar tonight. I don't know if that's what you're look-"

"Yes. Now." You tug me along, all thoughts of your parents left on the living room floor with your boots.

It takes you an eternity to get ready. I think I started to doze off when you were trying on your fifth shirt. You pick out my clothes, giving me a jacket of yours that you think matches my eyes. I don't have the heart to deny you. I hold my breath as I tug the jacket on, praying that it will fit, that I won't embarrass myself when my chubby arms don't manage to squeeze in.

To my utter shock, it slips on.

We get to the bar as my old roommate is finishing up. When I hear the opening chorus to "King J.J.," I feel like turning around and waiting outside until the next band is up. It's too late because he spots me from up on stage, giving me a wink as he holds up his fingers in his token pose. I try not to let my disappointment show on my face and wave in his direction.

We wade through the adoring fans singing lyric for lyric and eventually make it to a table where Phichit is waiting. He immediately sidles right up beside me, holding his phone up and saying, "Smile, Yuuri!" The camera flashes and I think I managed a grimace, but Phichit must like it anyway. "And we post our smiling faces like we aren't ready to barf at this song."

I laugh, looking over at you. You've invited Mila along and she shows up, dolled up to the nines and I think I recognize that skirt of hers. You both quickly take a selfie of your own, duck faces out and proud.

Phichit heaves a put out sigh. "I don't know why I come to his shows."

"Because he gets Leo's band in on the setlist with him?" I guess.

"True, but if he says 'IT'S J.J. STYLE!' one more time, I'm going to shove his microphone into his pretty teeth."

I laugh and it's mean, but I say, "You know, he actually says that in bed."

Phichit's mid-sip, but he spews his fruity cocktail out, giggling so hard that he's not breathing.

Mila looks between me and J.J., her gaze vacillating while her face contorts with disgust. "You didn't," she states more than asks.

It takes me a full minute to get her meaning. Meanwhile, Phichit's laughing worsens until his drink begins to come out of his nose and you're cracking up right along with him, smacking Phichit's back until he nearly chokes.

"No, ew, of course not. I was his roommate. I used to hear him and his girlfriend way more than I needed to. He would say it when they, uh, _finished_."

"It's disturbing how easy that is to imagine," Phichit says as he recovers. Mila hands him a napkin and he swipes at his face, leftover laughter still shaking his shoulders.

"So he's conceited even when he's orgasming." Mila scrunches up her nose. "That's nice."

Everyone laughs, but I begin to feel bad. We were friends, once upon a time, even if living together and J.J.'s overinflated ego soured that friendship. "J.J.'s actually a lot more self-conscious than he seems," I begin.

"IT'S J.J. STYLE!" J.J. yells into the microphone, his groupies screaming it with him.

"Never mind. He's pompous as hell."

"Isabella must be some woman," you say as you and Mila move toward the bar to get drinks, "to put up with that."

"There's someone for everyone," Phichit says.

By the time Leo's band plays, most of J.J.'s loyal followers have cleared out and we can converse at a more normal level. The Rampaging Zambonis are a good band, just little known. Phichit has appointed himself as their manager and tries his best to get them gigs where they aren't riding on J.J.'s coattails. It doesn't always work out. Phichit goes to every concert, but that may have less to do with him being their manager and more to do with their bassist.

"God, he's so dreamy," Phichit swoons, more than a little tipsy.

"Yeah, that stony expression gets me every time."

"Right?"

Phichit leaves me to drool closer to the stage. I spot you dancing over with Mila. There's no hint of your earlier anger anywhere in you and it softens this feeling in my chest. I guess I didn't realize how affected I was by your parent's comments. I feel like I can smile and not feel guilty about enjoying myself.

"Hey, you!" a voice calls from behind me.

I recognize it without looking. "Late, as usual."

Yuuko comes up to me, arms around my middle and pulls me into a backwards hug. "Sorry. I know. We couldn't get a sitter. Takeshi decided to sacrifice himself this time."

"Ah. The girls going to stay up all night to watch the competition?"

"As if their father can ever say no."

"That tough guy's such a softie for his girls." I tap one of Mila's neglected glasses toward Yuuko with the tip of my finger, beckoning her with a dulled tinkling sound. "Want it? Viktor's friend left it for me. Smells like turpentine with a hint of green apple."

Yuuko shrugs her mouth and downs the drink in one go. Her face twists instantly as she clicks her tongue. "Smells like turpentine?" she coughs out. "I'm pretty sure that _is_ turpentine, or something equally toxic."

We lapse into silence for the next couple of songs, bopping to the music. I'm not sure how the topic comes up, but we end up talking about my love life. About you. When I talk about the jealousy and the snooping, Yuuko's face goes full on mom mode.

"It doesn't mean that you can't have boundaries, Yuuri," Yuuko admonishes. I duck my head a little at her tone. Yuuko's word is about as good as gospel for me, at least on this subject. She's my only married friend. Her relationship with Takeshi is ranked second only after my parents. "Maybe you did something or maybe Viktor's insecure, but you can have boundaries and still show that you trust him."

She glares over at you for a moment and I pray that you don't see it. I don't want to carry this conversation home and damper the mood we worked to lift.

Her gaze cools when she looks back at me. "It's no question that he loves you."

"I've never questioned that."

"Don't lie." It's my turn to be skewered onto her glare. I laugh, a little uncomfortable, because I know that I can't ever lie to Yuuko. I can lie to myself all I want, but never to Yuuko. "You're your own person. So is Viktor. The joining of two people… it's difficult. It's scary." She twirls her wedding ring around her finger, the dimmed lights making it glow. That tiny thing has never looked so heavy. "It's a process. I'm still in the process with Takeshi. Probably still will be until we're gone."

For some reason, Yuuko's words don't make me feel any better. It's a process, she says. So I'll be stuck feeling this uncertain forever? The awkwardness, the jealousy, the insecurity, the fear, all of it will always be there? For as long as I love you?

You choose that moment to dance your way over to me. You sling a scarf around my neck and pull me into the small throng of dancing people. It takes me a minute to focus on you, on the music, and not the people around me, but when I do, I let go. I'm with you in this moment as you duck to twirl beneath my arm. The low lights make your eyes glitter, fireflies drifting in your ice-blue gaze. You're so happy, so free. I can taste it in your kiss.

For as long as I love you…

If I get to have moments like this, then I think I can handle everything in between, too.

* * *

It's later that night when I wake up and you're missing. My hand searches for you and finds an empty indentation. I call out to you quietly, fumbling over the top of the bedside table until I feel the outline of my glasses and slip them on.

The bathroom door is open. Its light is a beacon in the darkness. I follow it to you, sheets draped around my form like I'm a geisha protecting dignity, but stop before you notice my presence.

You're staring at yourself in the mirror, naked as you were when we fell asleep. Your hands are trailing over yourself, studying your body like it's a portrait full of mistakes and dark spaces. There's something shattering in your eyes. I wonder if I reach out, if I touch you like you're touching yourself, would I heal you? Or would I break you entirely?

Your fingertips dig into your skin, hard enough that they leave a red trail behind, but not hard enough to hurt. I can see all of the places your fingers have explored, over dips and curves and the curt jut of bones. There's a roadmap of claimed territory all over your body, but your fingers still seek to find. I can't tell what it is that you're looking for. Is it something outside of yourself, on your body, something plain for me to see? Or is it something within you?

I wonder if I can still see it, find the answer even if the question is held deep within.

Your hand stops over your breast, resting there for a moment before your nails claw against your skin like it's an enemy, a foreign body that must be destroyed. I gasp before I can stop myself and move towards you. Your nails are tearing in, drawing blood and I don't understand. Why are you hurting yourself? Why would you want to-

But you stop before I can take a step. My arm is reaching out towards you, but I'm still eclipsed in darkness. You sigh and rummage in a side drawer, grab a washcloth and run it over your new wound.

It's not the first, my eyes find. When I look closer, scrunching my eyes like I did when staring at that person across the street now coated in the works of other graffiti artists, I see other claw marks, some across your hip, a smattering on your thigh. They're here and there, just small, medically insignificant wounds, but I can't believe I never noticed them.

Never noticed you.

I was always so intent on hiding myself during our intimate moments that I never properly looked at you.

Or perhaps… both of us have been hiding in one way or another.

I look at your face, but what was once searching, shattering, is now plastered with indifference.

I bring my hand back to myself, digging my fingertips into my own chest, marking this moment into my skin, and scurry back to bed before I can be seen.

I'm pretending to sleep, breathing in trained intervals, when you climb back into bed beside me, hugging me to you. My breath hitches, gives me away.

"Hey, you," you say.

I pretend I've only just woken, drowsily responding with a, "Hey, yourself."

I turn, seeing a now fuzzy outline of your face until I grab for my glasses again. There's no trace of the man that I found in the bathroom only moments ago. You kiss me, slowly, fondly, and this is the Viktor I know. The one my heart can't help but latch onto.

It's hard to tell if you're the same person.

Your hands are resting at my hips, thumbs weaving patterns across my hipbones when you say, "My parents have arranged a marriage meeting for me."

I freeze in your arms. My ears begin to ring again. I don't think I heard you right. "A marriage meeting?" I'm surprised at how normal my voice sounds considering my head feels like it's exploding. Your fingers are no longer soothing on my skin. They feel spindly and wrong. They don't feel like yours.

You hold on to me when I try to squirm away. "It's just a meeting, Yuuri," you assure as if you're explaining to a toddler why daddy has to go to work. You're prepared for me to overreact and throw a tantrum. I can't say that I blame you, but I don't like it.

After all, _why aren't you?_ I want to scream. Why aren't you overreacting? Why aren't you throwing a tantrum? Why are you so accepting? You dislike your parents. You wouldn't go along with them if you didn't want to. What happened to wearing your most expensive Jimmy Choos just to spite them?

None of that makes it out of my mouth. It sticks somewhere in my lungs.

I can't breathe.

"But…"

"I don't like this either, but they said that they would leave me alone if I agreed to it."

You… agreed to it? My mind sputters around the question. It doesn't know what to do with it. Images flit before my eyes. Images of you meeting someone else, talking about _marriage _with someone else, holding someone else as you are me. I imagine they're beautiful, successful, confident, _female_. They're probably everything and more if they're a match for you.

I'm sure they don't let their insecurities speak for them in everything they do. They aren't fat or hideous or a failure. They're nothing like me, just a boy living in an eight-hundred dollar a month apartment on the lower east side.

I try to swallow around this feeling that sits in my throat as itchy and slimy as a moss ball.

How am I supposed to compete with someone else?

Marriage.

We haven't even talked about marriage yet.

"I'll be meeting the first one sometime next week."

"First?" my voice is hollow, empty of everything that's chipping at me so quickly that I may crack. I don't want to overreact. I don't want to prove you right. I'm not freaking out. I don't want to be too much for you. I don't want you to leave. I'm not ready for it. "I… thought you said that they arranged _a _marriage meeting. Singular. One."

"They have," you pull me in closer. I feel you around me, your warmth a calming aura. "The one next week is set up. The other two… don't have set dates yet."

I feel the claw marks on your chest, jagged zigzags pressed against my back.

Marriage.

"Okay." I close my eyes and pretend that everything's fine. Like I won't have daydreams and nightmares of you meeting more suitable partners. Like I won't feel like my whole world is up in the air, suspended above a cliff, until all of these meetings are over.

"Yuuri?" I don't stir. I become a rock in your arms, eyes squeezed shut, 'sleeping.' You huff a breath and I imagine that you don't understand why I'm acting this way. You pull yourself away. I'm back in the darkness, hidden from you.

I listen for you to sleep.

I think I feel the urge to write.

* * *

You find me on the floor, pouring my soul into a slender stack of pages that is gaining weight, growing healthy. I don't greet you. Can't stop. This madness, this genius will leave me the minute I do. Slip through my fingers like the thin wine we drank with dinner. It's still on the counter, open and fragrant, almost a pungent odor now that has clouded the apartment and made me near delirious. The cork is somewhere, lost to whatever corner it has jettisoned off to. Or maybe it's nowhere at all, sucked into that black void that ate your favorite leggings and snatched the pen that my parents gave me for graduation. The maroon one with gold lettering that spoke my name silently yet elegantly, all sloped in decadent letters. I spent hours looking for that cork. Gave up after the third time peeking under the fridge, knees red and hands turning gray from the thick dust. But it was there that I found something with the dust bunnies and the balls of hair. And here I am ignoring your raging rant. You don't care if I hear you anyway. So long as I'm here.

I can't let this go. These thoughts, these feelings, they are so genuine and real. My ankles hurt from kneeling. My fingers have been protesting for the last three hours, creaking and arching around the spine of my pen, but I can't stop. I've finally been possessed by that ever-transient spirit called inspiration.

I go to grab another sheet, mid-sentence, the next word on the tip of my pen, hanging by the threads of my overworked synapses, but there's a flower on my next page. It's just a quick sketch, a dandelion stretching itself towards the sun, but I know whose it is. I look up.

You're grinning, charcoal pencil in hand. "Now you'll listen to me."

"Can I at least finish my sentence?" I ask as I hang my head.

"Please do."

The worries come back full force when I no longer have my pen in my hand. I can only think about this marriage meeting you've been at. It was the last one, finally. But I can't breathe just yet.

I shove the paper away from myself and fling away the pen. It bounces off the wall, makes a _kerplunk_ sound into the dishwater in the sink. "Tell me all about it."

All at once your body sags, your grin turns into the most adorable pout, and you fly into my arms, your body flailing on top of my papers until they are a disaster.

Just like you.

"It was awful, Yuuri!"

I heave a sigh. I listen to you rant and pretend that it's annoying when really I feel like a peacock fluffing up its feathers. Every flaw of theirs seems to only highlight my good qualities. I can't say that I hate that you hate all of your matches.

"I need some brownie therapy," you announce, bouncing up and dragging me along to the kitchen where we make your favorite comfort food. You're stirring in the cocoa powder, the spoon going around and around in viscious circles as you continue your original stream of thought. "-and her haughty attitude! She kept staring at my hair. She wanted to ask, I could see it in her eyes," you say, giving me a look, "how she wanted to ask if I was going to cut it. It would have been one of her marriage conditions. I will bet on that."

"People have… marriage conditions?" I ask, spraying our glass casserole dish with baking spray while I try to not think too much about how you're considering _possible marriage conditions_.

"For corporate arranged marriages, you bet. When my parents would fight-" you pause to laugh, irony in your eyes as you look down into your pot, "When they would fight, my mom would always throw them at my dad. She had to get rid of her 'frumpy shoes' or so he called them. I guess she used to wear clogs of some sort. My dad would imitate the sound, like a _clork, clork, clork _noise," you say as you make the sound by flicking your hollowed out cheek. "She kept a pair after they got married."

"Oh, a rule breaker, huh."

"Not funny. Dad ended up burning those clogs. Threatened to annul their marriage because of it. And just think, all of those miserable years could have been cut short if my father wasn't all talk."

"But the world wouldn't have been graced with your majestic presence." I can't help but smile, hugging your side to me as you keep stirring.

"There is that." You nuzzle your nose into my hair, but quickly focus back on stirring when the pot hisses and the contents begin to boil. "I guess some of my mom's conditions were that he had to stop with the comb over and quit saying the word 'rad.'"

"Rad…" I say into the fine hairs on your neck. "I'll have to start using that word."

"Don't. Christ, please, don't. I always said I would never marry someone like my father."

Marry?

I watch you through the rest of the process, dazed, but you don't notice. You make brownies just to eat the batter, licking it off of your spoon, dabbing a touch onto my nose so you can lick it off of there, too. The pan sits empty on the counter, spray drying into grease.

We watch a movie, winding down. It's one of those college party movies where we take a shot every time one of the characters says the word epic, except this time it's a spoonful of brownie batter. You're noticeably clingier than usual, practically sitting in my lap, our ankles wrapped together, your brownie smile against my collarbone. You smell like chocolate and happiness and I think about that word again.

Marry.

My stomach hurts at the fifth spoonful, so I heave myself up, determined to make something to counteract this sick, heavy feeling. You whine and wrap your arms around me, a barnacle on my side, turning yourself into dead weight that I have to drag behind me as I trudge my way to the kitchen. You give up with another whine when we hit the linoleum and you squeak that it's too cold and your knee scrapes against the metal strip separating the two floors.

"Meanie, Yuuri. Leaving me all alone, adrift by myself."

"Uh-huh. Because I'm leaving to another country or something. Don't be so dramatic," I laugh.

"What are you eating?" you ask, nose upturned, when I slump back into the couch.

"Apples with peanut butter," I respond with a crunch into an apple that's been cored and sliced and made into tiny sandwiches.

"That's disgusting."

"It's delicious."

"It's disgusting."

"Says the person that puts pickles in their spaghetti."

"That's a culinary wonder. Those-" you point to my apple sandwiches with an accusatory pinkie "-are the grossest things I have ever seen."

"Yeah, sure. I ain't kissing you next time it's spaghetti night."

I finish my sandwiches and you're still excavating your bowl of batter with your tongue when I pause the movie. I'm pretty sure we both stopped paying attention to it a half an hour ago.

"So… you aren't going to marry her… right?"

Your ears twitch and I cringe at the hesitancy in my voice. You've done nothing but complain about the woman, your disdain towards her is plain as day, but there's still a part of me that feels small. Unsure.

Vulnerable.

I feel as if I'm being skinned alive, slowly but surely pulled apart until I'm exposed enough for you to rip out my heart when you leave.

You smirk. "Jealous?"

"A little…"

"Yuuri. Yuuri. Whatever will I do with you?"

"Is that a yes?"

You push the bowl away from you, your spoon tinkling in the bottom, and flop yourself gracelessly on top of me.

"_Oof!_"

Your hair falls into my mouth. I spit it out and you laugh at the mustache that your hair has created on my face. You do that thing again, entrancing me with the fluid movement of your wrist as you tuck your hair behind your ear. I could live forever watching you do that.

"If you think that I would ever fall in love with that heinous wench of a woman, then you don't know me at all."

Then what about me, I think to say and I want to say. Something stops me. The words are held hostage by this sinking feeling that brings my stomach to my knees. I love you. I want to be with you until we're nothing but dust. I would marry you tomorrow. Today.

I want to ask you.

I don't.

"Let's spend tomorrow together," I suggest instead.

There's a flicker to your gaze, disappointment, irritation, _exasperation_, there and gone. You gasp, smiling, and I think I must have imagined it. "We could spend the day traipsing old bookstores. We haven't done that in a while."

"You don't want to do something more exciting?"

"What could be more exciting than old books?"

"Have I told you lately how much I love you?"

"Not today. You love me? Prove it," you say with a teasing wink. I go in to kiss you, but you bar my lips, your fingers crossed into an X in my face. "No way, pal. You are not kissing me with that peanut butter apple breath."

"And how are you going to stop me?" I dare, swerving around your fingers and diving for your lips. You jump out of the way, cackling. I fall face first into a pillow, but I'm quick to follow until we're running circles around the couch.

"No! Gross! Get your nasty ass breath away from me!"

But you're laughing as I chase you into our bedroom. I fall into the bed after you, tickling your hips. You squawk your laughter into the fin of your poorly-stitched penguin, and I think

Nothing can be better than this.


	4. Am I not enough?

I guess it's easy to fall into a false sense of security. To ride the tides of peace even when the undercurrent spells disaster.

I should have paid attention to that flicker.

I'm coming home from another shift at the bookstore, trudging up the last flight of stairs. I have a manuscript tucked under my arm. Today was supposed to be the day. I told myself that I was going to talk to Minako's publisher today, but I freaked over the phone, pretended to be a pizza delivery guy looking for another address. I imagine telling you. I imagine your laugh as you say, "Pizza delivery? Find a new line of work, Yuuri?" I imagine the sorrow you feel for me, and the subtle disappointment lining your eyes.

I come up the last step and hear the laughter of two guys whose voices I don't recognize. And then you're talking and I find myself stopping just around the corner to our apartment. You've tuned your voice down, given it that honeyed quality it takes sometimes when we're alone together. You're being complimented, your pretty face, your dolled up hair, and I swallow at your flattered chuckle.

I don't want to look, but I do. You're bracketed by two guys, our upstairs neighbors, I think. You're wearing your favorite swishy dress and the heels that make your legs look miles long. You're leaning against our front door, casual, arms folded behind your back, legs crossed in front of you. I hate the smile you have on your face. The same smile you wear to welcome me home. The same smile you wear to wake me up in the morning. One of the guys, the one with a ratty band t-shirt and ripped jeans, his ears full of studs, puts his hand on your shoulder and I want him off.

Something crawls under my skin, an ugly thing, with spindly legs and claws that dig in as it works its way up my throat. I swallow it down.

"What are you doing, Viktor?" I ask as I come around the bend. There may be more bite to it than I intended.

You blink at me, as though you hadn't noticed me enter. You did, I saw it glimmer in your eyes when I peeked around the corner.

"I was just greeting our neighbors," you say, voice still oozing charm, and you put your hand invitingly on the man's forearm. "I never properly introduced myself. But they were just leaving. Weren't you, boys?"

"Already?" The other guy says. He's got fluffy black hair covered with a backwards ball cap. His grin makes the creature in my throat writhe.

"Sorry, my man's home."

The guys are disappointed, if their grunts are any indication, but they leave, not without a couple of glares in my direction and a whispered, "The little fag probably thinks that stare is intimidating."

You smile prettily and curtsy like I've never seen you do before. When they turn their backs you waste no time in flipping them off. "I've heard better compliments from cows."

"Impressive," I joke. "I've never been complimented by a cow before. What's it like?"

I don't ask about our neighbors. We don't talk about the situation at all. It's glossed over.

A part of me knows that you enjoy the attention. The same way I enjoyed making you jealous. It stings. I look at your shoulder and I feel the urge to scrub all of that man off of you.

You light up when you see my manuscript.

The pizza delivery story seems lacking now.

* * *

It's not the last time I catch sight of those guys. I come out of an unsuccessful writing session to find you missing. I search the apartment, open the door and hear you a flight up. You're talking on the stairs, leaning against the railing and talking to the one with the ball cap.

Still I don't say anything.

It's your life.

You're allowed to have friends.

Even if they are a little handsy. Even if you're two-tenths away from the line of flirting. Even if I can't stand the sight of you talking to them.

I don't say anything.

What if this is why you leave?

What if I kick up a fuss, and that's what gets you out the door.

Tonight is the final straw.

I come home to your laugh. It strikes me wrong, its tenor, the tremble to it. It's the laugh you use when you don't find anything funny. It's the laugh you use when something's happened and you want to leave. A little nasally, caught in the back of your throat laughter.

"Come on, it will just take a second."

"No, really. I think I-I'll just pass. Could you let go of me now?"

That has me racing up the next flight of stairs. My bag falls off my shoulder. I think I hear it thud down a couple of steps. I don't look to find out.

"Your blob of a boyfriend isn't here. Why don't we show you what a real man can do for you?"

"Yeah, sweets. Pop this and we'll show you a great time."

I round the corner to our apartment just in time to see you being led away from our door. There are three guys around you now, one new face that I've never seen before. Ball Cap Guy's grip looks near bruising. Stud-Ear has his arm around your hip, leading you forward. You're still trying to politely pull yourself back.

"I really think you guys need to back off now-"

The new guy curls his hand in the waves of your hair, tugs, "Shh, babe. Don't-"

I don't let him finish. The creature fights its way forward, past my fear, far past my insecurity, and screeches out of my mouth, "Viktor!" I huff in breaths. I'm terrified when they all turn and look at me. For a split second, they look caught off guard, but then recognition sinks into their eyes and they smirk and laugh.

"Hey, look, it's tubs," the new guy says, his hand loosening its grip on your hair.

Ball Cap shrugs. "Come to watch?"

They don't even care that I'm here.

It's at that moment that I realize how powerless I am. I can't look you in the eyes, haven't since I called your name. But it doesn't have to be just me. "Phichit!" I start, breathless, "Phichit and Mila and Leo's crew… They're right behind me. You were going to get the drinks for them, yeah?" I nod and it takes me a minute, but I find a way to be more convincing. I hear the front doors below thud open, a crowd coming in with the whistling wind. "Hey, Phichit, did you bring that speaker system?!" I holler.

The guys don't wait for an answer.

"Yo, let's bounce. We can hit the skank later."

"Right."

It's amazing how fast that suggestion gets them away from you. They're gone before I hear the incoming group hit the stairs. You're standing still, facing away from me. I notice your knees shaking.

"Viktor?"

The shaking stops. You right the jean jacket on your shoulders and fix the kink out of your hair. You turn and stride right into our apartment like you're made out of unbendable steel.

"What was that?" I slam the door behind me and it makes some of your tacked sketches flutter wildly. Some scatter underfoot. It's not my intention, it just happens. I'm suddenly angry, furious. It comes in waves, feral and roaring. "Were you just going to let them do that to you? Just let them lead you away to god knows where?!"

"You didn't need to do that."

"The hell I didn't!"

"I wasn't in any danger."

"You don't know that." Your face is impassive, tight with possible disapproval. You stand guarded in the doorway, your arms crossed. Like you believe what you just said. "You don't know that! There were three of them, Viktor. They could have- They could have hurt you or wo-_orse_." My voice is broken, cracking. I don't want to imagine what could have happened had I not come home. The images come unbidden anyway.

"Please, Yuuri. Because you had to ride to my rescue. I'm not just a pretty face with kitten claws. I could have stopped them if I'd wanted to."

"Then why didn't you?!" I ask, the words tearing out of me, blood spraying from an open wound. I don't understand what just happened. I don't know why you're giving me a look like I just drank straight from the milk carton. "Why would you want those men to talk to you like that? Why… Why would you let them touch you?"

That seems to break the spell. Your arms fall from you, dangling at your sides until your hands clasp onto the little ties at the bottom of your shorts. Your lip trembles and you bite into it just as tears shimmer along the seams of your eyes. Your head falls forward, obscuring your expression from my view.

For some reason I want to see. I want to watch you fall apart.

This has to affect you.

Doesn't it?

You're doing this on purpose. You're ripping me open and throwing my heart against one of your canvases just to see how it splatters.

"Am I not enough?"

Your head shoots up. You grab onto me, your grip fragile and uneasy. You're holding onto my elbows. I want to shake you off. I want you to hold on tighter. "No, Yuuri. Don't think that. You should never think that."

"I can't help but think that you want me to feel this way."

"You think I'm that manipulative?" You sound shocked. You look pissed.

"Why else would you do that? You know how I didn't like you with those guys before."

"Really?" You yank yourself away and I feel the scrape of your nails through my jacket. "I knew, huh?" you ask, right up in my face. You crowd me into the corner, the way you know I hate. It makes me feel small, belittled. You've never done this to me.

Nothing like this.

"You really told me how you felt, huh?"

The tears begin to fall. I feel them drip onto my face. It gives me a sense of ill-begotten strength. "Course I did," I say, but I can't recall a time when that sentence proves true.

"Bull shit. You didn't say shit about it. Not about them. Not about the marriage meetings-"

"The marriage meetings? What was I supposed to say about them? What does this have to do with that?"

"And what about that little mouse?" You point to the side, past our apartment, past our street, out to wherever Chihoko lives and breathes. You point to her with all of the anger in your body. "You know how I feel about her. Unlike you, I wasn't vague or subtle or _silent_ in the slightest."

"She's a customer! She comes to my store for books."

"Yeah, so do I," you spit, caustic sarcasm slipping off of your tongue like venom.

I rake my hands through my hair. I have to hold onto something, _anything_, just to get the shaking to stop. I feel it in my bones, rattling until they're going to break. I have to take a deep breath, but all I breathe in are fumes. "She's an old classmate. That's all I see her as. Why are we even talking about her?"

"I want to feel desired!" Your yell seems to bounce off of the walls, as if we're deep in an echo chamber, stuck in a dark cave, trapped in a world of just us and our mistakes. There's a sharp _whap_ sound when you slam your hands on your thighs. Your knees knock together until you fall. I half catch you and we slide down to the floor.

It's just us and the cold wood of the entryway.

I hold you while you breathe raspy, shaking breaths. You're forehead butts into my sternum and stays there. You hold onto me tight, tighter than I thought possible. It helps me see past the anger. My fury, my fear, drain from me as though the quiet is a vampire that sucked me dry of everything.

I still don't understand. I don't know why you do this. I don't know why you want to be desired by other people. I don't know why you claw at your skin in the dark of night. I don't know why you hate your parents. I don't know why you sneak into my things. I don't know why you don't like to talk about yourself. I don't know why you dress the way you do.

I just don't understand.

Maybe that's why we're here.

"That's all. That's all I want, Yuuri. I'm sorry. I know I was being dumb, it's just sometimes-" You grab my forearm blindly, fingers fumbling with the fabric of my jacket. The material makes a swishing sound that distracts you momentarily. "-sometimes I like people seeing me… as a man… as a woman… I like feeling wanted."

I don't understand.

"Viktor," I whisper gently. I take your face in my hands, thumbs circling your gorgeous cheekbones. "I want you. Is it- Should I show it more, or…? What do you want me to do? How can I-"

"Nothing, Yuuri, nothing." You assure me, your hands holding mine to your face. You pull one of my hands free to kiss the winding lines on my palm. Alleyways, you once called them, one night after we'd first met. You looked at my hands and traced the creases, said that they were alleyways, the secret passages to places you've never been. You said you would follow them wherever they take you.

"I like other people seeing me… but I feel… You're the only person that I want to see the real me."

"I want that, too."

You look up at me, through me, your eyes like fire, flames that engulf me in a heat that could melt my skin. I feel like molten lava under your gaze, melting into you until we're one. "I want to see you."

* * *

I get lost in the measure of your hands.

Every inch. Every touch.

I don't see you, my eyes closed though I can see the shadow of you blocking the light. You wanted to see me. I wanted to see you.

The lights are on, but my eyes are closed.

I feel how naked I am. Every inch. With every touch. It disgusts me. Just the thought disgusts me. I don't know how you can want this. I'm round and pudgy and all I feel is this heaviness that makes me want to curl up.

It's like I'm on an exam table, waiting to be told my faults. I'm being picked apart until there's nothing left. I'm too flawed to save.

I feel your hands caressing my skin. I feel your breath, heavy and warm beside my ear. I can feel your eyes all over me and I have to resist the urge to squirm away and hide. I must look hideous, yet you're growing harder against my thigh. Your breathing picks up, puffs of air panting against me.

I don't understand.

"Yuuri."

I hear my name.

It startles me.

It's the same name that I've had all of my life. I've never cared much for it. Always misspelled by friends. Always mispronounced at meetings and appointments.

The way you say it makes my heart beat again.

I open my eyes and there you are, my man of mystery, hovering over me, staring directly into my soul.

"Yuuri," you say again, so low and husky that it tingles along my skin. You're feeling along my body. The pads of your fingers, soft yet determined, slowly capture the shape of me beneath them and steal my breath away. Your breath hitches as your fingers slow along my sternum. Or maybe that's me. I'm barely breathing, dizzy, lightheaded. My body feels like a furnace, radiating heat as it sucks up the fire from your gaze, your traveling fingertips, and your words as your lips murmur muscles, bones, my anatomy into the quiet. It's the most sensual thing anyone has ever done to me.

This touch… It's with the same delicate finesse you apply when handling your brush. I remember you teaching me how to hold your brush in my hand, like a parent teaching a child to hold their first eating utensil. Except your brush isn't just a tool to you. You cherish it with every stroke.

You touch me and I feel cherished.

Looking into your eyes, I feel lost and found all at once. There's a hunger there, as you wait and watch. You devour me with your gaze. Staring into those eyes, I can almost believe that I'm something worth craving.

"Do you love me, Yuuri?"

The question is abrupt. Everything stops. I don't feel you anymore. You're hovering over me again, waiting. I want you to touch me. I want you to keep touching me until we've melded into one.

"Of course."

"As a man?"

It feels like a test.

You're looking at me, but you're not. The air cools between us. I shiver, now cold, left in the dark to stare at someone I don't know.

It's as if I'm the mirror you're looking for answers from.

I look at you, all of you, from your bent toes to the clipped ends of your hair.

I see a book held tight in your hands. I see a heart-shaped smile that's as dorky as it is charming. I see the paint that spots your clothes. I see your wrist moving elegantly as your fingers adjust your hair. I see the flick of your brush. I see magic in your eyes.

I answer honestly and I'm ready for you to leave.

"I love you as you are."

You stare at me for the longest time.

I don't move. I don't blink. I don't dare breathe.

You smile a wobbly smile and you deflate on top of me as your arms give out.

"Ugh. I feel like you enjoy crushing me. Do I look like one big cushion to you?"

"I love you, Yuuri," you say in a jumble against my chest, "as you are." You kiss between my ribs. I feel it sink into my heart. "Never forget that."

* * *

_"The world does not wait for one that sits still, Yuuri."_

"I know, Minako-sensei. I will. I'm sorry."

I'm walking home from the bookstore, talking to Minako over the phone. She's finally finished yelling at me, reminding me that I should submit my manuscript. She has a right to be concerned, as my boss and my mentor. She might as well be my family. She has my future in mind, has nourished my potential into something somewhat worthy of publishing.

_"I don't want your apologies. I want to see your name on a book cover. Got it?"_

"Hai. Hai."

I turn off my phone and shove it in my pocket, readjusting the load of papers in my arms.

I take a blind step up the stairs to our apartment, my body moving with muscle memory as I return to reading over my work. Suddenly I feel like I've hit a wall. I slip down a couple of steps, gripping the railing just in time to wrench myself out of a tumble. My papers aren't so lucky. They scatter and flood down two flights. A couple even flutter down and stick to the entryway door.

"Sorry. Didn't see you there."

It wasn't a wall.

My eyes widen the second I notice who it is. I stare at his stud earrings. It's the first time I've been close enough to see that his earrings are green, the bottom ones shaped like jade seahorses.

He smirks at me and I very much doubt his apology.

But I don't want trouble. For me or for you. I don't know what I would be able to do with trouble.

He doesn't say anything more. He continues down, my papers crunching beneath his clunky boots.

I'm at my desk later that day, trying to read around a splotch of dirt when you literally run out of the shower. You're naked and dripping water all over the floor. You barely have a brush in your hand before you're painting again.

I watch, amused. The first time this happened I screeched and ran for a towel, tried to wrap it around you while you painted. Now, I wait to see your shower epiphany given life, then I'll scold you.

You're soaking wet, hair a mess of tangles and split ends, but you're focused. There's life in your eyes. The blue of your irises has never been so vibrant, so intoxicating. You finish with a sigh. You need another shower with the green swatches on your chest and arms, but it's just another part of you, something necessary like a liver or an esophagus.

I tell you you're going to catch a cold if you don't dry off. You whip me with your mane of drenched strands and giggle when I scramble to protect my papers from the glitter of rain it creates. "Viktor!"

"What? Most of them are messed up anyway. Why do they have boot prints and dirt on them?"

I freeze momentarily, but say, "I love the soggy dog look you've got going on. Your most charming look yet."

You pout and mutter as you stomp off to get a towel. You blow dry your hair in the living room, grinning when I have to lay myself on my desk to weigh my papers down. When you're finished, you shut off your wretched machine with a pointed click.

"God, your hair is everywhere." I'm plucking it out of my coffee and sweeping it off of my desk. I'm pretty sure there's a piece of it caught between my molars.

"It is, isn't it?" You say with pride in your shoulders as you fluff your hair between your hands and hug it around your face.

I take the opportunity to tease as I look at your newest piece that you slaved over for the better part of two weeks. It's propped up in the living room, well within sight of my desk. "Is that a strand stuck in the blue?"

"What?!"

"Nope. Just a darker streak. My bad."

You sulk. "I ought to rope my hair around your neck."

There are more incidents like the one on the stairs. They aren't anything more than minor teases and blurted insults, not enough to get worked up over, but I still keep them from you.

Until I can't.

I'm sliding the key into our mail door when I hear the squeak of shoes on the floor behind me. I turn to see who it is when they grab the mail door and wrench it open into my face. I feel the burn as the door hits me bluntly in the nose, the rip of my skin as the metal tears across my lip, and the soreness when I cup my hands around my nose and fall to my knees. My glasses clatter to the floor, frames bent and a lens broken.

I recognize the laughter as Ball Cap Guy runs up the stairs with a new trail of insults.

I hear a _pitter patter_ before I look down to see red drops on the floor. I quickly wipe them up with my sleeve.

I wait for the blood flow to slow, grab the mail and my glasses and make my way up the stairs. I'm not sure why our neighbors have turned me into a toy. I doubt it's about you anymore. The trip ups, the names, the physical assault. This is just a game for them now.

It hurts, but I try my best to cover my nose up before I make it to our door. I'm thankful that you won't be home. You're choosing pieces for another exhibition with your agent.

"Yuuri! What happened?"

At least, you were supposed to be.

"_Ah_\- Um, nothing," I reply through a cupped hand, pinching my nose until it warps my voice.

Skepticism quirks your brow, but you run to the bathroom and emerge with a wet wash cloth. "Move your hands for me, babe." I do as asked. You dab at my face and it burns at first, like you're prodding at a nasty bruise, the black and blue kind that don't disappear for _weeks_. It becomes soothing in time, the warm cloth on my skin, your care as you hold it there. You're a smudge behind the prickles of cloth. I have to squint to see you. You're looking at my side. You don't look happy.

"It really is nothing, Viktor."

"Nothing?" I feel my glasses being slipped out of my jacket pocket before you wave them in my face. It makes the room look like it's caught behind the blades of a fan. Or maybe that's the dizziness talking. "_This_ is nothing?"

I slip the cloth out of your frustrated hand to apply it myself. "It isn't a big deal," I try, but you're having none of it.

"Is this the same 'nothing' that keeps messing with your papers and spilled Pepsi all over you last week?"

I swallow, but it doesn't help me think. Instead I start to choke. All I taste is the tang of blood, the smell of rust stuck in my nostrils.

"It's those assholes, isn't it?"

I panic, but I can only choke more, coughing into the washcloth. You're moving and I have to stop you, but I can't. I can't do anything. Again. Dread curdles the blood in my veins.

I worry about what you'll do. I worry about what they'll do to you.

I wait to hear the slamming of our door, to hear you yelling and pounding on the neighbors' door upstairs.

None of that happens.

There's a steady grip on my arm. You lead me over to the couch, sit me down and flick on all of the lights in the room. You take the cloth from me with more gentleness than I probably deserve. Before I can question you, there's a flash, swift and sharp like a flint spark. There's another one and you sigh.

"Did you just take a picture of me?"

"Evidence." The cloth is placed back on my nose, my folded glasses slipped into my palm. You hug my head to your shoulder and your scent of paint and pine stabs through the musk of blood. "Lucky for you I think we still have some tampons from when Mila slept over."

I laugh. It buzzes painfully through my nose. "I'm not sticking something that belongs in a vagina up my nose."

"Heh. Let's go to the clinic. Just to be safe."

I go to work the next day even as you beg me not to. A knock on the nose isn't an excuse to miss a shift. I won't hide, either.

"Besides, if I take today off, I won't be able to go to the exhibition," I whisper, my voice still horrendously nasally.

You clench onto my hands, but let me go.

I'm cautious on my way home. I tell myself that there's nothing to be afraid of. Your voice is in my head. _"They're just some snot-nosed punks,"_ you said when we sat in the waiting room, watching some obnoxious game show on the TV in the corner while getting sneezed on by a literally snot-nosed punk. But a part of me is afraid. I feel weak. I feel more than a little helpless.

I hate it.

I make it to our door without incident. I thank the cosmos, carefully glancing towards our neighbor's place, but stop when I see a group outside of their apartment. Two are uniformed officers, the third a well-dressed man in a suit, briefcase in hand. Your agent is there, too. He looks at me, frowns, and turns resolutely back to the door.

I don't think it's the cosmos that I should be thanking.

Three days pass. I don't see the trio at all after that. It takes me until a new tenant arrives to find out that those men are no longer in our building.

"Why do I feel like you and your kitten claws had a hand in this?" I cross my arms as I lean my hip against the living room wall.

You're filing your nails on the couch. Your calm expression turns menacing. "I wanted to gouge out their eyes with the ends of my paintbrushes."

I wince. "Remind me to never get on your bad side."

"Chris said he could figure out a less messy and more legal way of dealing with things."

"Your agent," I breathe. I'm grateful, but it strokes the petty cat of inferiority in me.

"So I sent him the pictures of your nose and glasses. Besides," you lean against the arm of the couch and hold your hand out to assess your work, "I'm too pretty for prison."

"Thanks, Viktor."

"Don't thank me." You fix your eyes on my purple nose and broken lip. "I'm sorry. I let their empty praises go to my head. You got hurt because of it." You reach out and grip onto the sleeve of my shirt, pulling me to the end of the couch. You sit up on your knees and this way we're the same height, breathing into each other's space. I think I can see into your soul now, too, in the colors swirling through your eyes. Your hand ghosts over my injuries. "You're my fire, my light, my redemption."

Redemption for what? You don't let me ask. You just kiss me until I forget the question.

* * *

It's hot tonight. The dregs of summer stagnate our apartment with a dense heat that leaves us lethargic. You're laid out on the couch in one of my dress shirts that you carelessly tossed across your shoulders. I'm close, slumped on the floor, trying to absorb the coolness of the floorboards, too distracted by the somehow alluring scent of your sweat to concentrate on my paragraph.

Your latest piece is in front of me. I catch myself glancing at it every other minute. It's something abstract, I think. There's a mixture of colors and it reminds me of the paintings Yuuko's daughters used to do, watercolor splotches going every which way. I'm sure there's more to this than that. You're a professional. Me comparing this to a child's attempt at art is probably insulting. So I search deeper.

It's made up of such dense strokes. I can feel the emotion in every one.

I think of thoughts, jumbled and left in a disarray. The heavy patches of paint are like clouds upon clouds of thoughts. They're entangled and intertwined. I imagine them as if the thoughts are my own, exploding from my mind only to bleed onto canvas.

"What's this one's name?" I ask, poking the air with my pen.

You loll your head to look at me, then your painting. "Still untitled."

I hum in acceptance, but your eyes still rove over it.

"Do you ever wonder what it would be like to _choose _to feel something?"

I cross out a word. My pen makes that scratching sound, like a mindless scribble. It used to be my favorite sound that I associated with Minako. "What?"

"Like if you could bottle emotions, store them, and feel them later. Would you want to?"

"You mean like remembering that guilty kind of shame you feel after not meeting a deadline?" I laugh with a curt snort. "It would be nice to pop open a jar and remember that feeling to keep me from procrastinating."

You click your tongue and push yourself up. You roll your eyes like I've underappreciated one of your artworks again. "Think a little grander, Yuuri. Imagine if you're feeling down, or grief-stricken, or lost… You could unscrew a lid and remember what joy is. Remember why it feels right to breathe, feel the air on your face, be _alive_. You could open yourself up to a moment of adventure. Like you're cannonballing into the open sea, full of bone-chilling water and that sand smell that sticks to your skin for days. Standing on the tip top of a mountain, one with the sky, high enough that it sucks the air from your lungs. Or you could open it up to remember what it was like to be as free as a child, where the world was expansive and limitless. Feel the slap of your feet on a blacktop and listen to the chains of swings rattle. Feel the rush as you jump off of a swing and fly. You land on your feet, feel the impact tingle up your legs until you fall. Your knees sink into the dirt and your hands smell like rust."

It's a vivid picture that you paint, not with a brush this time, but with your words. I truly wonder what it would be like if one could bottle up their emotions and store them for later. I wonder what it would be like if people could exchange them, feel another's pain, their happiness or envy or pride. I would voluntarily take a drink of your confidence. "But wouldn't that cheapen those moments?"

You're hands are up in front of you, curled to grip those imaginary swing chains. You look as if you've been caught in that breath of a moment. The moment pops, and you stare back at me as if I've shaken you from a pleasant dream.

"I feel like those emotions and experiences would be less special if you could feel the joy of your wedding day by cracking a lid or experience the bliss of falling in love by taking a sip off of a bottle. Where would your sense of adventure go if you didn't have to go anywhere to experience it?"

"I… I never thought of it that way."

"And even if you were in pain or grieving, those are important emotions, too. You're experiencing them for a reason. You shouldn't override them."

To this, you laugh. It's mocking, in a way, but I don't think you're making fun of me. "Some emotions… aren't supposed to be felt with such potency… Not all of the time."

My anxiety is the first thing your words peck me with and I realize how naïve I sounded. It's an instant example of a time that I would choose to override my emotions. It might also be an emotion that I would extricate from myself entirely, lock it up and throw away the key.

I look back at your painting and it changes. I see emotions, your emotions, a chaos of feelings bursting into each other. Some of them are bright and hopeful, like blossoms, and others are jagged explosions of colors that burst into others with shrapnel-like cuts. It's a painting full of conflict, the range of emotion within the self. But beneath all of the color is a darkness. It oozes from the background and permeates through everything else. Once I notice it, it's all that I can see.

I think of you bottling it up and shoving it away.

This enduring will of sadness.


	5. It's still untitled

"Yuuri! I can't get this damn tie to lay right."

You watch as I lean in, fixing your knot with a swift turn of my fingers. There's a lazy grin on your face and I don't know how you can be _happy_ and _content_ and not a complete wreck like I am.

It's the night of the exhibition.

This is not an exhibition of just your works, but a juried exhibition of art submitted by multiple artists of high acclaim. Your art is going to be judged, and you look as content as if you're chewing on your favorite licorice. I, on the other hand, am growing progressively anxious as the event nears.

"Okay." I back up a few paces, wiping my sweaty palms on the backs of my thighs as I take you in all in one glance. "How is it that such a fancy person such as yourself can't tie a tie straight?"

You raise a brow as you lean into my space. "Says the fancy man whose tags always stick out of his shirts." You reach around my neck to press my tag beneath my collar as you leave a kiss below my ear.

"I knew it was like that."

"Uh-huh."

"I think we're ready."

I'm mid-turn, grabbing up my key when you stop me with a "Wait!" You run over to the living room, scrambling through a pile of your sketches to unearth something you are desperate for. With a flourish, you return to me only to tuck a pen behind my ear and a small notebook into my breast pocket. You stand away from me, mirroring my earlier actions as you look me over with a hand on your chin, staring much like a critic eying an art piece. It makes my palms sweat even more. "There. That's my Yuuri."

A smile bursts across my face as I sigh out a laugh through my nose. You're going to be judged in a matter of hours and you're worried about my penchant for taking notes. "Thanks. I suppose this is more my usual look."

"Made complete by the smeared writing on your chin."

My smile vanishes. "What?"

"It looks like…" You tilt your head to the side like an innocent child with a question and narrow your eyes. "Per… something?"

"No way!"

"You wrote on your palm and then leaned on it again, didn't you?"

The evidence stares back at me as I glance at the smudged stain of words written beneath my thumb, a thought I'd awoken to while reading. "Gosh darn it!" I'm in front of the bathroom mirror within seconds, scrubbing at the faint marks on my chin with a washcloth.

You rest against the door frame, a fondness to your gaze as you watch. "You never change."

I grumble out a retort, but it's weak to your embrace as you sidle up behind me, bumping your forehead into my back. Your presence is warm, soothing. I feel like you're holding me together.

I didn't know I was so close to falling apart.

* * *

By the time we arrive we are dreadfully late. You take it in stride, a queen as you enter with all eyes turning toward you. Your agent looks upset, relieved, and unsurprised all at once. With a quiet nod, I leave your side to view other works. You slip from me with a wink, caressing the curl of my ear and gently flicking the end of my pen that's stuck there. You turn and you are no longer mine. The distance between us widens, gapes. You're in your world, shining as the artist that seizes the minds and hearts of all who witness your work.

I watch you mingle and dazzle and laugh. It lightens my nerves, but it also pricks me. I grit my teeth against the sensation of stinging nettles developing under my skin.

I think there must be something wrong with me. There has to be if your success intimidates me. It should make me happy, but it doesn't. It makes me face our differences, my faults. It's another mirror. The way you sparkle and shine, the way you and your work capture people's attention and ardor. It makes me feel gray, colorless. It's a choking feeling, like when you're about to cry. You can't breathe because you know that when you draw that first breath you'll drown in a sea of tears.

I hate this feeling more than anything.

You're doing so well, practically traveling to other worlds, but I feel like I'm being left behind here on Earth. I'm a hamster spinning on its wheel. I never go anywhere. No matter how fast I run, the world moves on without me.

I look at the art, trying to tamp down on the heaviness growing behind my eyes. I don't understand any of this. I never have. Art is so foreign to me that it's like I'm attempting to decipher another language. I can't read it. I can't pronounce it. No matter how hard I try, I don't understand you.

I come face to face with that abstract painting of emotion. Maybe it isn't emotion. It probably isn't. I'm mistranslating everything again. Only now I'm not just disappointing you, but myself.

It's still untitled.

Like what we are to each other.

My stomach roils like I've come to the height of a roller coaster. I'm staring down at the drop. The end. Goodbye. It's inevitable. All roller coaster rides come to a close. My relationship with you has been exhilarating, painful, a blessing. I can't stay up here forever.

Your agent claps me on the shoulder. It's not a friendly gesture, though by all appearances it could be. His hand stays there, fingers digging into bones.

"I underestimated how far Viktor was willing to go for you."

His dashing smile hides the silent fury boiled into his words. He waves at a woman with his free hand. The woman turns and then he's looking down at me. Hazel eyes pierce into me and I'm acutely aware of my healing injuries. The urge to hide rises inside of me, but I don't yield to it.

"You ought to be ashamed, yet you show up on his arm with that face." He pulls his hand away, glancing at it in disdain before balling it at his side. Our eyes rise to meet your piece which I have yet to leave the safety of. I suspect that we see different things. He knows what this painting means to the world, to you. "Of all of the people to choose, some no-name writer that can't scrounge up two cents let alone his own courage."

It is in this moment that I feel an understanding with your piece. I imagine my own blend of colors, tangled and coiled around each other. Only my darkness, this feeling inside of me, is above it all. My darkness is a veil over the other swirls of emotion. You have to look through the darkness to see any color at all.

Your agent stares down at me. I feel doubt heave inside of me like the first wave of a hangover. I think back to our conversation last night and wish that I had a shelf of those stored emotions. I could pop open a bottle and breathe in that certainty I felt in my love for you.

I would give anything to feel that right now.

I close my eyes.

I'm with you.

I'm next to you in the arcade, your hair tickling my neck as my sweaty palms take the controls for the umpteenth time.

I'm pushing you in a cart as you holler and hoot. I swerve around aisles until we almost run over an employee.

I'm by your side on the fire escape, pizza grease drying on my fingers as I stare at your art - _our _art - on the wall across the street.

We're dancing to the music in a tiny bar off of Lex Ave.

We're in bed together as you etch the shape of me into your fingertips.

We're standing across from each other in the bookstore. You smile at me with tears in your eyes. My note is in the pocket of your overalls, right over your heart.

I can't summon up the feeling. I think of all of these moments, but I know in my heart that this is wrong.

I'm wrong for you.

As I am.

I can't understand you. Your art is still alien to me even as I've watched it birthed before my very eyes. Your style, your parents, your desires, the scratches… I don't understand any of it.

I can't protect you.

I can't make you happy.

All this time I thought I was standing right next to you, staring out at the world by your side. But maybe I've been stuck outside, looking at you through that dirty window pane.

It's inconsiderate, selfish, appalling, but I have to do this now. Before I can change my mind. Before I look at you and let my love for you speak over everything else. I take you aside, lead you out into the dying light of sunset. The oranges and purples darken your eyes, make them look more green than blue, and for a moment I think of the sea, the Hasetsu bay, my home. I think of that boy that set out to write about the world.

I'm cast in the blue hues of your shadow. I don't want to stay stuck in darkness anymore.

I say it. I say everything inside of me, speaking as I inhale until I'm ballooned up and my face feels like it's turning purple, but your face doesn't change at all. I don't let you stop me. I don't let you speak. I know that if you put up any resistance I'll cave. I'm weak to you.

When I finally finish, I let all of the air out of me in a rush of breath. I feel lightheaded and woozy and it's not just from a lack of air. There's silence, and the rush hour of traffic as cars pass and pedestrians talk and the street signal makes that indicative noise for blind people, but mostly there's silence. Your face is still blank, but you're crying. I can only stare, my heart beating in my throat as I wait for you to meet my eyes, but your gaze is rooted to my worn out work shoes.

I wait for you to yell, to scream and cry. I wait for you to punch me in the face. I wait for you to curse at me, tell me off and leave me bleeding. I wait for you to laugh, like all of this really was a joke. I wait for you to say no, to pull me in, kiss me until I've given up on air completely and convince me to stay. I wait for you to say anything at all.

You don't.

* * *

I don't know what I was expecting.

I cut you out of my life like a tree that lopped off its own limb. I thought it was for the better. I won't hold you back anymore. I can work to better myself, get stronger, become someone worthy of you even if I don't ever get to call you mine again. But now I'm having these phantom pains and I don't know how to treat them.

I can't stop thinking about you. I wake up thinking of how you're no longer beside me. I miss the smell of burnt toast in the morning. I miss stepping on paints scattered all over the floor, and canvas stretched across carpet. I can't stop thinking of what you could be doing. Of who you're with. Of if you're okay.

You must still think of me, too. My voicemail is full of little reminders and after thoughts. You tell me of my doctor's appointment next week and I think of you staring at our calendar before bed. You remind me that I should get the scraggles cut out of my bangs or no publisher is going to give me the time of day. I think of you holding the comb that I left behind while you chew on the ends of your hair.

I'm staying on a friend's couch, but I'm only a block away from your apartment that used to be ours. I think on the distance, count the number of steps it takes me to walk to your door at one in the morning when I leave one of my zillions of sticky notes on your door. It's a random early morning thought I had of you.

Remember when you used to say they were your favorite? My early morning thoughts?

We don't talk anymore. Silence is our language now. That and the calls that I never answer so I can listen to your rambly messages and the knocks you ignore so you can read my notes stuck over the peephole.

I miss you.

I love you.

I'm sorry. I did this. I would give anything to take it back, but something in us was broken.

I hope that I can find a way to fix it.

* * *

It's been two weeks since you stopped calling, a week since I stopped loitering and littering at your door. I'm filled with such a pressure-behind-my-eyes, teeth-chattering sadness. It overflows until I hate myself. Until my tears stop. Like a candle I burn myself out.

I unearth my sticky face from the couch, pushing myself up and listening to my stomach make obscene noises like it's gargling mouthwash. I've eaten until I couldn't anymore, flown through bags of Cheetos and there were enough taco crumbs that they crunched under my toes. Tacos were a bittersweet comfort food. They made me think of you, hazy and paint-splattered with vodka on your breath. Then I gave up eating, managed it enough just to stay moving.

It's colder without you. I want to watch you paint. Laugh. Giggle as you type out some nonsensical sentence on my typewriter just so you can listen to the sound. I stare longingly at that typewriter now, and my notebook and pen. I haven't written. It's funny how desperate I was to write after I left you, to prove that I could be better for you, but the words sailed out of my reach as soon as I'd dumped my last box onto Phichit's living room floor.

Phichit is sympathetic until he isn't. "Enough with the pity party. Time to reenter society, Yuuri."

"Blech. Make me." His smile twists as he makes for the window, hand threatening the pull. I give him my best glare over the back of the couch. "You wouldn't." The blinds hiss their way up until the sun is staring me in the face. I groan, diving back down into the folds of the couch. "You don't _understand_, Phichit!"

"Enlighten me."

I peek out from over the puff of cushion, trying not to feel too wounded as he rolls his eyes. "All I ever wanted to do was write, yet ever since I left Viktor… I can't get out a word."

Phichit's unimpressed expression staggers. He sits his hip on the edge of the couch and stares down at me as he bites at the dried skin on his lip. "If you can't write it… then maybe the story doesn't mean enough to you."

I grimace, because Phichit doesn't understand. He's one of my closest friends and I love him dearly.

But he's not an artist. He's not you.

"It's _because_ it means so much to me."

I can't write. My brain is broken alongside my beatless heart.

I choose to listen to your advice. I leave. I let the seed grow.

Everyone thinks that New York is made up of magic and dreams and whimsy. In the real world, it's made of zig zagging streets choked with people, inflated prices, and pollution. I'm wandering, taking in the sights, floating around this bloated city like it's made of the magic people believe it is. Try as I might to leave my thoughts behind, all I see is you. This city is you. We were together for five months and even the garbage piling up on the sidewalk reminds me of you. I remember when you got so hair-pulling annoyed at the pile by the bus stop that you kicked a bag and it flew into the street. A car had to swerve to avoid it and you almost caused a pile up in the intersection. You laughed maniacally the next day when the department of sanitation had the street shinier than it had been in months.

_"That's how you get things done, Yuuri."_

Then I see you.

You're across the street, bopping around from foot-to-foot in a pair of those shoes that look like murder for your feet. (They are, I've seen your blisters.) You're waiting for the signal to turn, but not paying it any attention as you sketch out something into one of your shabby books. There's that look in your eye, a look we share only when I'm writing without a care.

You have a braid in the front of your hair, tied off with a little feather. The wind is a biting kind of cold, but it's playful, dancing with the feather and the leaves that swivel on the sidewalk around your feet. It makes me feel homesick.

I want to cage you, the flighty bird.

I want to let you fly free, watch you thrive in the sky.

The signal turns and you hurriedly scribble before tucking your book into the crook of your elbow and running across the crosswalk with your pencil in your mouth. You reach the finish line but you stop. Our eyes meet. Your mouth falls open and your pencil drops to the ground and rolls into a grate, down to live in the sewer.

You spot me and I don't know what to do, what to say. I have millions of words constantly swirling in my head, but I have none for you.

I can't help but run.

You call my name. I don't stop. My feet beat quick paces as I swoop and swerve around clumps and crowds of people. With the bustle of this city, I can't hear you, but I know you're there. I can feel you, your eyes staring at the back of my neck, your breath as it billows out of you.

It's desperation that fuels me until I fall. I slip in a puddle of leaves and collapse into the rough edge of the park, breathing more than I have in weeks, my heart pounding like I still have one.

I don't have to look to know that I've lost you.

Drowned in leaves, I lay there watching the sky, clouds quilted in lavender weave with your favorite colors of autumn. It's cold and the dampness of the leaves seeps into me. Your image is burned into my retinas and I feel words course through me like an electrical current. They sparkle and crackle into my fingertips. I resolve to go home and write them all out.

As soon as my ankle quits burning.

Day crawls into night. When I limp my way back home, smacking myself in the face (because why, god, why couldn't I have grabbed my notebook when leaving to 'let the seed grow') I find a chuckle burble its way up my throat.

The city brought you to me.

And me to you.

Maybe, just maybe, there's some magic in this city.

* * *

"You ran away from him?!" Yuuko is understandably shocked as she jerks and nearly scalds me with her espresso.

"I didn't know what to say, so… I just… ran…" I whisper, fingertips digging into paper, bleeding my tea of its warmth. My eyes dot around the coffee shop, like you'll suddenly pop into my life again. We're half a city away from your place and mine, but it still doesn't feel far enough.

"You have the most rotten luck. You go out to take your mind off of the guy and then bounce right into him. But running, Yuuri? Seriously? _You_ broke up with _him_, right?"

I have nothing to respond to that with except, "I was at an art appreciation class this morning." I take a casual sip of my tea. It hides her look of disbelief.

"Wow, you really like making yourself suffer, huh?"

"I'm trying to understand Viktor's artwork."

"Tch." She leans forward, her wicker chair crackling with the shift of weight, and flicks me in the forehead. "How'd that work out for you?"

I rub at the spot with puffed cheeks. "The professor started saying something about brushes and it made me think of when Viktor was comparing them to my-" She blinks at me and I instantly redirect my words, "-and I burst out laughing. Loudly. The class looked at me. The professor looked at me. Then I almost started crying so I ran out of there. Not before I banged my head on the desk when making a grab for my backpack." I brush my bangs aside to reveal a red swell. "Right where you flicked me, thank you."

Her lips curl with laughter, but she bites her tongue. "You had an eventful morning."

"Yeah."

"You aren't going back," she says with a sip and it isn't a question.

"Nope."

Yuuko watches me for a minute through the steam rising over the rim of her cup. I feel years rewind, as if I'm as young and inexperienced in this world as I was when she found me hopelessly tottering between department buildings in school. Yuuko was going to be a writer. She took more to journalism, to questing the world for its facts, truths, and deepest secrets. She would have been damn good, but the triplets became her priority.

She heaves a sigh, hand tugging at the scarf loosely tucked around her neck. Her ring catches my eye again and I wonder if I'm doing this all wrong. Yuuko gave up everything for love.

But maybe that's what I'm doing, too, in my own way. I want to fix us, I want to fall back into your arms, I want to find that undeniable thread that connects us again, but I doubt that I can. I can change all I want, but who says that you'll still want me? Who says that you'll still be there?

A part of me wishes you won't.

Maybe this is my sacrifice. Yuuko gave up her career for her family. I can give up on happiness for you. You can be free again. You can soar, travel to those distant lands, be as unattainable as your agent once said you were.

A leaf on the wind.

I can watch you from down below.

"What are you doing, Yuuri?"

Yuuko's voice is a drill in my brain, spiraling metal hollowing out the depths of me so easily.

I think briefly of the future, one without you in it.

Maybe I won't go back to that art appreciation class. Maybe I'll stop turning to food for comfort. Maybe I'll stop loafing around on Phichit's couch and find my own place. Maybe I'll take Yuuko up on her offer to join her self-defense classes, something perfect for a pacifist like me that just wants to learn how to protect.

Maybe I'll make Minako proud and finally turn in my manuscript.

Maybe I'll stop letting the world pass me by.

Maybe I'll learn to stop loving you.

"I'm dealing with the fact…" The answer sticks in my throat like a lodged piece of gum. Even after I've spat it out, the taste of it remains, stale and bitter. "…that he can be happy without me."

* * *

The sixth month mark passes and I realize that we have now been apart for longer than we were together. It doesn't hurt as much as I would have expected it to, but it leaves an icy ache in my chest. It refuses to thaw as the day progresses.

I'm at the counter when I feel that familiar prickle at the back of my neck. I look up, watching for your eyes. But you're not there.

The feeling persists, itching at my skin until I sign out from the register and rush from my spot. I go where I found you. I can still feel your presence there. I wonder if you'll be sitting in the fiction section, legs crisscrossed and slouched over that book that started it all. I wonder if our eyes will meet and I'll trip over myself into another shelf of books.

But you aren't there.

I laugh a little at myself. Still chasing you even though you're long gone.

You're not there, but neither is the book.

It's a half an hour until closing and I'm the last one here. I'm restocking some shelves and considering closing up early when I glance up and there you are. The book is in your arms, cradled right over your heart. Your hands are clasped together in front of you so tight, two clams slammed shut on each other. Tears balance on your lashes like dew drops on the edge of a leaf. Your eyes, they're sad, and I can't figure out why seeing me drives you to tears.

Except I think that I may be ready to cry, too.

You take a visible breath and walk over to me. I'm surprised that I haven't dropped my stack of books in my shock. I would have, if I weren't holding onto them so tightly that my fingers cramp along the edges. You laugh, light and airy like petals on a spring breeze, and my chest thaws.

"Some things never change," you say. My heart stops as you reach behind me and thumb my tag back into my shirt. It makes me choke out some horribly soggy gargle of a chuckle. You wrap your arms around me. I apologize as I get snot on your trench coat. You pull me in closer.

We sit across from each other at that same table we were at almost a year ago. The nostalgia is overwhelming and I begin to think that you're doing this on purpose. Neither of us speak at first and I wonder if I should start. My feelings tend to come across better on paper. Would it be weird if I slid you a note?

You look different now, refreshed. I could mourn your lack of hair, now cut shorter but crisply styled. Your bangs are still long enough to get in your face and you sweep them behind your ear with that same delicate movement. It still leaves me breathless and mystified like I'm caught in the seconds after a firework show. You're undoubtedly the same person, but there's a confidence lightening your irises, one that isn't made up of attitude and defiance.

You were always trying to find yourself outside of the canvas. You have now.

My eyes fall to the book still in your possession. "I never asked why you didn't just buy the book."

"I wanted you to see me." You dig your fingernails into its sides and I see flashes of that drunk person seeking solace in a reality far from their own. Your smile is nothing like theirs. "And you did."


	6. Why didn't you ever show me?

It's been so many months since I've seen you, been with you, kissed you, yet you walk into my life and those feelings flood back into me like it was yesterday. I'm so happy, but I know that I don't deserve this. I'm the one that broke this. Even if we were both already a little chipped and bent up at the start.

Why are you here? You're supposed to be gone, off to bigger and brighter worlds.

"You're getting published…" Your words are soft, reverent. You look at me like I'm a wizard finally wielding his power.

I can feel the heat rush to my face. I'm easily unbalanced as I scratch my cheek with an uneasy chuckle. "You heard about that…"

"Congratulations." You grasp at my unoccupied hand, your thumb worming its way into my fist before burrowing small circles into my palm. "I can't wait to read it."

For some reason, I feel my tears come anew and I'm angry. I'm so angry that I can feel it quaking in my every muscle. You must feel it through my hand, see it in my eyes, because you pull back, suddenly stiff.

Why are you here? Why are you happy for me? Why are you congratulating me? Why don't you hate me?

I left you.

How can you look at me like you still love me?

"Yuuri-" you try, tugging at my hand, my sleeve, but I yank myself away.

"I'm sorry!" It sounds no better than my laugh earlier, a garbled mess, but I manage to get it out. You wince like I served you a punch to the gut. "I… I-I…" I search my brain, the table, the cosmos, but there are no words. I have nothing to give you, no true apologies, no explanations, I come up empty and I thought that I had changed. I thought I'd changed into this metamorphosed person for you, but I haven't. I feel like a caterpillar desperately striving to become a butterfly, but all I've turned into is a moth.

Nobody looks at moths.

"I'm sorry." The words aren't mine this time, they are yours. I look up through the squiggles of my entangled eyelashes to see the regret cracking across your face. "I should have said something. I had no words!" You laugh, a little hysterical this time. "I wanted to ask who… W-Who would be there to fix my tie? Who would be there to tuck your tags? Who would be there to get me fast food tacos and my favorite Slurpee mix when I got too sloshed? Who would get you to relax when you were getting too absorbed in your head? But it didn't feel like enough! I couldn't sum up what we were to each other and I didn't know how to ask you to stay and God! I've never been so _frustrated _without words before and I understood your pain as a writer. But- But-" You clap your hands together, pressing the sides of them against your mouth like your praying and I'm too stunned to say anything back. You sniff and shake your head like you're whipping your hair back (but there isn't hair to whip back anymore) and look up at me. "I'm glad you left me."

Confusion furls my eyebrows and it's my turn to feel like I've been socked. "You're… glad…?"

"No!" You're quick to correct the thoughts filling in the silences in my head. "Not like that. I mean-" Your fingernails dig your desperation into my hand, scraping bright red lines. You're leaning across the table, so close and I remember us in the entryway in your apartment, the only other time you've ever looked at me like this, like I was the anchor keeping you grounded. "I needed to grow up."

I make no move, but you deflate back into your chair.

"I put myself and worse… _you _in danger. I… had to get myself together. I had to cut ties with my parents. I put my future on track. I created boundaries with Chris and other people. I even figured out more about who I was." You press your finger into your chest. "Though I still have some figuring out to do…"

Your eyes beg me to understand and I do. More than anyone should.

We are always somehow in the same orbit.

Your smile is small, troubled. "I don't think I could have done all of that while we were together. You said you loved me as I was. I was afraid to change, but more than that… I don't think I realized that I needed to change."

My tongue dances around in my mouth, searching for the right response. I find it in you, inside of your insecurity and honesty. "It was a lie I told myself," I nod, more to myself than you, "that I wanted to be better for you. I needed to get to know myself. I had to learn how to be myself before I could learn to be with someone else."

"You said you loved me as I was…" Your gaze falls to look at yourself, your hands, your arms, your body. "But I'm not…" Your mouth moves and I see the struggle on your face. You don't want to ask. You're afraid of the answer. Just like I am. "Can you still love me? Even though I'm different?"

"Of course. I love you more every single day. Nothing changes that." It's my turn to latch onto you, to brush aside your bangs with an amateur rendition of your movement. "I did love you as you were, but that doesn't change just because you've grown. My love has grown right alongside you." My lips quiver, yearning for you. We both lean in to fill the space between us.

I taste something new in our kiss. Something whole and honest and real.

"As you are," you whisper when we part, your lips still moving along mine. "As you will be. Forever."

You help me close, but you don't stop talking. It's not the babble that I'm used to. Filling the silence. You speak about things that you only ever touched on a rare occasion or when you were distressed.

"Every person I've ever been with… I never really trusted them." The clack of a chair punctuates your sentence as you steady it upside down. It's a hard thing to hear, the fact that you didn't trust me, a thorn I never really acknowledged being in my side. "My parents were always cheating on each other. They thought it was funny. It was always another moment of 'don't tell your father' or 'best to keep this from your mother, son,' like they didn't both know what the other was doing. I thought love was like that. Deceitful. Ugly. That there would always be something rotten at the center of even the purest of relationships."

I've stopped moving. I stare down at my name tag on the counter. My finger plucks at the outer rim where the plastic is peeling.

"You proved me wrong. You proved everything wrong."

My head swivels in your direction. You have a wide smile on your face like you expected my reaction.

"I could only see it after you were gone. And I found this." You drop your shoulder, slinging your satchel forward to pull something out.

I recognize it instantly. "My notebook." I haven't seen it in months and now I know why. It's a messy thing, like most of our books are, scribbled all over and bursting at the seams with scraps of paper and abducted napkins that are filled with epiphanies.

"Why didn't you ever show me?"

It's titled _Viktor_, though despite its name, its namesake was never supposed to see it.

"You felt my work. This showed me that. You understood me better than I understand myself."

The notebook plops in front of me, right over my name tag and my twitching hands, and it's open to that day that you painted the car driving down some random, faraway road. My notes are a reflection of my thoughts when I saw your art, the scenario of us on our own, on a trip away from then, when I saw you and the leaf and knew that you were too spirited for the cage of our life.

"Except," your fingers circle around a fragment.

_A small part of me can't help but wonder when it will be that you leave me. When will the wind finally pick up and whisk you away on your next adventure?_

"You knew I was never going to leave, right?" I don't answer, but I feel it balled up beneath my throat. You take my face in your hands, fingers threading through the hair around my ears, and bring our foreheads together. "I would never leave you. Not in my wildest dreams." It's a handful of minutes, quite possibly dozens, that pass before we pull apart. You wink at me with a wry smile. "Ironic, though, that you're the one that left me."

"I figured it was my turn to be first for a change."

"Hah!" You shoulder bump me and it feels weird laughing about our break up like it didn't just end, but your laugh has always been infectious.

Your fingers graze through the pages of my notebook, traveling across words like this simple notebook was all you ever needed to tame the wanderlust. I'm embarrassed at my own thoughts penned down before you. They're the most sincere words I've written, your artwork translated into mine.

"I was approached with an offer to publish some of my art in a book."

"You're getting published…" I say out loud. Everything has always come so easily to you. Your success is no surprise, but this time bitterness doesn't cling to my heart.

"I want your written interpretations next to each picture."

My brain stutters. I can't compute any of what you just said. All I see is that face, androgynous and beautiful, the explosion of words, and my writing next your masterful art.

Our first true collaboration.

Together as artists.

You have a new notebook, small copies of your work pasted beside copies of mine. I flip through it, my mind too dazzled to really see. The pages flop to the last picture. The one abstract piece that distressed me so. It's titled now.

"The Enduring Will of Sadness," I breathe out, too low and quick for you to catch.

It's like I've left my own fingerprints inside of your work.

Yours are undoubtedly inside of mine.

"I've kind of already gotten the ball rolling on that, too. So I hope you say yes." And you get in my face, all puppy dog eyes, and I can only shake my head, trying and failing to not smile.

"I guess some things really don't change."

I walk back with you, hand in hand, so you can slot your book back in its place. I talk about how I'm going to have to get used to your new haircut. You pout and parry back that you have to plump me back up, fingers moving in to squish at my hips in a way that makes me squawk out a laugh. I feel like a real couple this time, me with a little less weight, you with a little less hair, us with a lot less baggage.

You're slipping the book back and caressing the spines of its neighbors when I voice a thought that's been on my mind for longer than I'd care to admit. "You didn't read that book the whole time that we were together…"

"It replaced the emptiness." You duck your head to peck me on the cheek. "With you… I never felt empty."

* * *

"Yuuri~! I want to read it!"

"I heard you the first time!" I holler back at you from the kitchen. You've been whining at me nonstop about wanting to read my new book. I asked you to kindly wait until I get the first official copy from my editor. You proceeded to flop theatrically onto my bed as you yell through the tiny space that is my apartment.

"But Yuuri!"

"And please stop shout-"

Three thumps sound out in succession from beneath my feet. It's my downstairs neighbor with her broom, no doubt. I have my own place now and I love it, this feeling of supporting myself, standing on my own two feet with no crutches or hands to keep me from wavering. But it still kind of sucks that I live in an apartment that is worse than yours by many standards and that everything I do seems to be on loudspeaker for the rest of the world. I suppose I should count myself lucky. Finding a cheap place to live on your own in _New York_ isn't the easiest task.

"Yuuri~! Please?!"

"Viktor, will you-!"

_"Keep it down!"_

Ugh. I live in a slum. But it's my slum.

"Wait until it's ready, please?" I whisper into your mouth as I reenter my bedroom, sliding into bed beside you. "It's just one more week, Viktor. Just one."

Your silence is welcome, but I suppose I shouldn't have assumed that it was one of acceptance.

I return from work the next day to find you already here. You're still in sweatpants and slippers, the little puppy ones with the ears that bounce as you walk. It's the closest you're going to get to having a poodle with a lease like yours.

"Spend the day sketching again? I thought you already figured out the co… ver…?" But your sketchpad is laying quiescent on the little side table, half-bent around Phichit's old lamp. Your pencils are in a forgotten heap on the ground. "What are you-?"

"What is this?" you ask, referring to the stack of loosely bound papers I could have sworn were neatly tucked between my mattresses. They're rumpled and curved like the waves over asphalt on a summer day. Some kind of highway mirage. If I get closer, will they disappear?

My bag slips from my shoulder, thunking on the ground between us. "Huh?"

"This," you insist with an adamant shake of the papers and it's kind of hard to question their existence now.

You hold them out to me, still sitting as you do when you take a break to relax with a thick novel, your legs stretched out and your upper body slouched against the side of the couch. You used to pin up your hair into a bun with a pencil, but now the surviving strands of your bangs are clipped to the side. You don't look unhappy. There are no telltale signs of anger, no flared nostrils or locked jaw, no hint of the disapproval that usually thins out your eyebrows, no sadness or betrayal which usually results in crying or dead eyes that stare blankly. I look at your face, pale and slack, and see only shock.

"That's… not my book."

The shock does not subside. Your fingers flip through the pages, your eyes reflecting my words. "It's… about us… isn't it?"

I say nothing. I nod, because being the deity that you are, you are the only one who can grant me words and just as easily whisk them away. It's all in front of you, our love, what it means to me. What it has always meant to me.

You try not to smile that impish smile that I know too well as you suck in your cheeks. You stand up, tapping your pinky against a page, your voice colored playful. "This character sounds an awful lot like me."

"You always said you wanted your name to be something like Sophie."

Then the tears come. I brush away the first one as it trembles from your nose. "They… They're…" Your words crinkle from your throat, all raspy like you sang your favorite song with all of your heart in the shower, or you've just run straight home from the subway because you thought of a new brilliant idea. Your mouth is stuck morphing between a smile and a sob. "I-I'm a… _they_?"

"It's how I see you. It's in the title. Remember? _As You Are_. Sorry it's changed a bit," I wince, staring down at crossed out pronouns, "but so have you."

Our foreheads bump together as you finally lose your war with your emotions. There are too many tears streaking your cheeks, but I try to catch them all. "You have such small hands," you laugh, "but they are capable of holding so much."

"Like what?"

My hands glisten with your emotion and you leave tiny fish kisses atop each fingertip. "Stories. Dreams. My heart."

We spend the night going over the story together. You've completely forgotten about the real reason you ransacked my room, but I don't think you'll much care for my new book now with the way these papers have never once left your lap.

Something flutters inside of my stomach, though, as you pass through some of the harsher truths in our love story. "You're not mad?"

"No," you answer with a smile, but it's one of those rare ones, mostly for yourself. "I love it."

* * *

"Why can't you just move back in with me?" you ask from your place at the table, doodling over an article in the newspaper that I've been skimming while making breakfast.

I flip a pancake, doing that little pan flip thing that you oohed and aahed over one of the first nights I stayed over, but you're not paying attention. "I like my place." And I do, even though it's been getting harder and harder to leave your apartment lately.

"I found a cockroach under your bed."

"Yeah. I heard you screeching about it when you smacked it with my shoe."

My focus is on the sizzle of the bacon as it crisps, but I still catch the click of your tongue. "Pretty sure I only wounded the beast. It's still there, growing and growing so it can eat me later."

"Oh, now I have mutant cockroaches."

"This isn't funny, Yuuri."

"You think it has a family?" I glance over my shoulder, watching you pen an elaborate, comical expression on a picture of the mayor who looks horrified as the people standing around him are now giant cockroaches. "Like a mama and a bunch of baby cockroaches? What is that called? A brood? A swarm? No," I point with my spatula, the bacon grease popping as if to affirm my spark of thought, "an intrusion. Just like you."

"Still not funny~" You hum, though you say it through gritted teeth. "I'm so not going back to that squabble you call a home."

I stare up at the cracked ceiling over the stove that sprinkles its flavor into our food from time to time. "Mmm, because Casa Viktor is some lavish retreat."

You thump something on the table to get my attention. I can imagine the scrunched eyebrows and pursed lips of your pout, but ignore it in favor of cooking. I plate our food, listening to you rant about the dangers of roach bites and diseases as you tilt yourself on the back two legs of your chair. I'm contemplating kicking the chair legs out from beneath you, teaching you the dangers of gravity, when a phone call saves you.

You throw me a look and I know that we have yet to finish this argument. You answer your cell without looking at the caller ID. You immediately regret it. "Mom?" you ask with a wince, but your face freezes.

Something cold seeps into the marrow of my bones.

I can hear your mother on the other end of the line. She's in hysterics, sobbing and yelling, but I can't make out any words. Instead of trying to decipher them, I stare at your face. It becomes a void, a wall I'm still learning to climb over. I sit and offer my presence as I settle a hand on your thigh, but you brush me off.

That one word is the entirety of your half of the conversation. Our food has gone cold by the time you click to end the call. You sit and your cell is still in your hand, left out on the table like your trying to push it away, push the entire conversation away, but you still want to hold on. The cell phone is a rope that keeps you from falling.

"Viktor," I say and it's wrong. So small and I sound like I'm cowering, but I don't know what to do. Your face remains unchanged, unreadable stone. You deflect all of my touches, my attempts at conversation.

Your voice is blank of all emotion as you say, "My father's dead." The words hang in the air like smoke, sticking to the ceiling and dispersing slowly.

My ribs grow tight, tighter around my heart and I want to comfort you, console you, heal you, but you're a rock right now. Your shaky relationship with your parents is something that has always been apparent, a pain that has settled within you like a malignant tumor that flares with any new contact. I wonder over your unflinching expression, your steady breathing, and the lack of any evidence of grief. It's an alien reaction to someone like me who would crumble at the loss. The death of my father would devastate me, but I love my father.

Do you? Do you care? Are you going to mourn? Celebrate? Move at all?

"Viktor," I say again, with more strength and mental fortitude. I slide my chair closer, and it's the bumpy sound of wood skidding across wood that makes you meet my eyes. It's that blank look of resignation that I have always hated the most about you. It's one of the challenges we're still wrestling against. Together. There is still this distance, taut between us. "Talk to me, Viktor. We Agreed. We aren't going to shut each other out of our problems anymore. We promised."

You resist my prodding again. And again still. But I persist until I don't just amble up over the wall, I pierce right through it.

"I love you, Viktor. Please let me in."

Color finally saturates into your cheeks. Your body shrinks. Your face twists. Anguish curves your spine, brings your feet to the seat of the chair and your face to your knees as you curl your entire body in my direction. "-_Hate him_." You cry and you hate that you're crying. I comfort you wordlessly, tucking you and your hate-filled crying into the crook between neck and shoulder. "I hate that he can still do this to me. Still make me cry! I hate him. _Hate_ her-"

You recount the other half of the conversation that I couldn't make out. You breathe your anger into me and it simmers in my lungs. Because in the same breath your mother notified you of your father's untimely demise and begged you to take over the now headless company. Even after you terminated all contact with them, made it clear that you have your own dreams to follow, you are still expected to abide by their wishes. She even had the gall to bring up a prospective bride, the daughter of a fellow company. Another fixed marriage to be made like a corporate deal.

It's all a condition of your father's will. You will not inherit a thing if you don't follow the terms they've set for you.

Wisps of fury linger in my throat. How dare she do this to you. How dare they _both_ do this to you. It may have been your mother on the phone, but I doubt your father would have wanted the notification done any differently.

I despise them. But more than them, I despise myself. I despise this part of myself that still fears your parents, the power and luxury that they dangle in front of you like a bone. As if you'll one day leap for it and away from me.

"_-with a boy."_

"It's just that… I never wanted to see him again."

But this is about you.

"When I broke free of them, I said I never wanted to see him again." Conflicted feelings glimmer in your eyes, quake through your shoulders. "Now I never will."

I swallow the bite of anger. I tack on a smile, give you a small shoulder bump. "…There's always reincarnation."

You scoff, but I've seen some of the books you read. "He should reincarnate as a snake."

"Even if that makes you a baby snake in the next life?"

A breathy half-laugh escapes you, the broiling aggression lifting from your frame. "As long as you're a baby snake, too." My smile sticks, my breath catching above you and you look up at me with a cocked brow. "You didn't think you were getting away from me that easily, did you?"

I hug you closer, this distance between chairs feeling like a gulf as I pull your armadilloed body over to my side. Your long, bony toes tuck into my thighs and your forehead bumps against mine, stays there. The anger subsides, and for now the tears go with it, until there is just this warmth between us.

And I think, quietly to myself, that living on my own is overrated.

Who needs mutant cockroaches anyway?

* * *

_"They have items more in your price range that will suit Viktor's taste, but be careful in that part of town. You know what?"_ Phichit pauses. His voice crackles on the other end of the line and I hear the telltale beeping of a crosswalk signal. _"I'll go with you."_

"No. I want to do this myself." I stare at the address scrawled down on a spare sticky note. If I leave work early, I can make it there by five. "For Viktor, I'll go through hell and back."

_"Gawd," _Phichit breathes, his footsteps stuttering in the background before they stop. _"You're so cute it's gross… but, _seriously_, be careful."_

"I'll try."

It takes me an hour to get there, but when I do, I take my time. I look at everything. Twice. Three times. Until something pops out at me on a corner shelf that I didn't see before. "It's perfect," I say, and that's something for someone who never believed in perfection until I met you. It's not Jimmy Choo, but it makes me think of you every time I look at it, every time I feel it sitting in my front shirt pocket.

It's dark when I leave. Rain drifts down slowly from the bloated purplish-gray clouds above, but I put my hood up and make my way towards the subway. You said you wanted to have dinner at your place, a little late after one of your meetings. Maybe eight. Nine if you can't get Chris to stop talking. The timing is good for me; it allows me to grab a box from my apartment and surprise you with it at your door.

I'm ready to move back in.

I'm ready for the next step.

Tonight couldn't be more perfect.

The weight of my purchase bounces against my chest, beating along with my heart.

Perfect.

The word reverberates against my heartstrings and I think of your face. Your smile. The way you bite your lip when you're excited. How your eyes will sparkle and you'll laugh and cry. We'll make a home together, you and me.

You are my home.

You are all that I think about.

You're what I'm thinking about when I feel a sudden pressure at the back of my skull. It's heavy and painful like taking a hammer to bone and it drives my face forward until I see white. Bright sparks shimmer beneath my eyelids. There's a ringing sound in my ears. Stone grinds against my face, beneath my hands as I hold myself up against a wall, my feet unsteady and slipping beneath me.

I don't know what's going on.

The ringing stops abruptly with a loud, wet _pop_, and sound swallows me. The splash of a puddle. The honk of a horn. The ding of a bicycle bell. The high pitch buzz of a streetlight as it comes to life. The strumming of an out of tune guitar accompanied by a deep, broken voice.

I'm pushed forward again, my body being pressed up into the wall of a building. My eyebrow scrapes against brick, the rough edges digging into my skin and making it sting. There's a hand against the back of my head, holding me there. Its fingers squeeze against my skull, keeping my hood up. My glasses are twisting, and I can hear the plastic giving until it's ready to snap. I have to breathe out of the side of my mouth, but my breathing is heavy, labored, and I don't think there's enough air.

I don't know what's happening.

"Don't move. Don't you make a sound." The voice, it's low, but harsh in my ears, demanding and curled cruel.

My hands flatten beside my head as I attempt to look as nonthreatening as possible. "A-Alright, just-"

"I said _don't speak_!" Something is jabbed into my side. It slides up my jacket, my shirt, until I feel the slightest prick into my skin. The tip of a knife. "Don't try me." He slips my bag off of my shoulder and it splats onto the wet concrete. Then he's up against me.

My body starts to shake and I try to keep myself as still as possible, but it makes the shaking worse. My nerves jangle in my stomach as I'm pushed forward again, higher, until I'm up on my toes. The rounded ends of my sneakers make it difficult to stay up and I wobble. I tilt just the slightest and I bang my elbow on a dumpster as I attempt to steady myself. I startle. It's not the loud _wham _or the pain of the surely forming bruise that has me jumping. It's the sharp nick of the knife an inch away from my spine.

"I'm not t-t-trying anything, I p-prom-"

"I will _cut out_ that tongue, I swear. Don't make this into something it doesn't have to be."

I know where I am. I'm in the dark of an ally. I can see people walking by, talking, laughing, oblivious. If I could just call out-

The knife is removed from my side. His hand leaves my head. I almost make a run for it.

But then there are hands moving down my sides, slipping in and out of pockets.

Ah.

I've been mugged before. It was a simple run-by. They ran past me, took my wallet out of my hands while I was paying for coffee, and kept running before I realized what had happened. It was nothing like this.

Fear skirts around the edges of my heart, makes sweat drip along my temple.

_Just let them have it. Let the police take care of it afterwards._

It's the first thing we're taught in our self-defense classes. Yuuko had elbowed me in the side, and I ran a bashful hand through my hair. It was something we both already knew. She was with me when the run-by happened, called the police as I stared hard at the person's back, trying to memorize all I could about their appearance.

I'm fully prepared to do the same thing now. I stay as still as my tripping feet allow. I pay attention to everything about the guy, his deeper, more masculine voice and the hard edges of his body having given his gender away. He's tall, taller than me to keep me nearly hanging here like this. I can feel rings on his fingers as he tugs my wallet out of my back pocket. There's whiskey on his breath as he whispers into the fabric of my hood.

"That's right. Still like a bunny. No heroics. It will just take a second."

My shaking stops. Sweat slips down my spine.

I recognize that voice.

_"-It will just take a second."_

It's one of them!

One of those men that lived upstairs.

One of those men that nearly led you away.

They could have done things to you. Hurt you.

And I almost let them.

The memory hits me just as gangly fingers pat my jacket pockets and grope up my shirt. He's so close, but I can't let him have it.

I can't let him have you.

I put my training to the test. I use all of my strength to push off from the wall. It unbalances me as much as it does him, but I use the momentum to slam my head back into his. I feel the impact, hear something crunch.

Some crazed need to protect makes me turn too soon, and I lose my foothold on the lessons. My focus is no longer survival. I don't run. I don't cry out. I face him.

He's holding his nose, groaning as he stares at the ground and steadies himself. He has a beanie on, but it's too low for me to see his face or his hair.

Green seahorses catch my attention.

Then he barrels toward me. He doesn't look up, just yells as he runs in my direction. I harden my stance. I'm ready to grab his arm and throw him over my shoulder, into the dumpster where he belongs.

I forgot about the knife.

It's a searing kind of pain. Kind of like when I almost always catch my hand on the burner when cooking at home.

"It's you…" he gasps.

Except it's a liquidy, molten heat that singes inside of me, boiling all the way through me.

"Dammit! God damn-"

The knife tears its way out of my chest. Through flesh and muscle and ligaments and bone and-

I can't breathe.

There's that ringing again. It follows me to the ground, stays with me as I stare out past the pavement, past this alley, and out into the street. Through the mist of rain and shadow I can see the subway entrance. Right there.

I was almost there.

"I didn't know! I swear, I didn't-" Hands skitter over me, but I barely feel them over the warmth that pools from my chest. "I didn't know…"

My eyes close. Those bright white sparks come back, dancing across the backs of my eyelids.

They make me think of fireworks.

Like I'm tiny again, holding my parents' hands as I'm swung between them at a festival, watching fireworks pop in the sky.

Like New Year's when I stood on the bridge with Yuuko and Takeshi and their little family, and the green and blue fireworks made me think of your eyes and how much I wanted to share the moment with you, warm your chilled hands in my pockets, carry you home on my back because you wore the _worst_ shoes again.

They make me think of you.

Always you.


	7. I won't let go

_Death frightens me. _

_I think of the cold, wet earth, and the sweet scent of decaying flowers. I think of darkness, deeper and more merciless than that of night. I think of nothingness. A blankness that yields nothing, no color, no thought, no warmth. It's empty. Everything slips away until you're stripped down to your soul, lost in the tides of time, all alone. _

_I don't want to die. _

_I never allowed myself to think about what comes next. Not when I was staring down from my perch on the Manhattan Bridge, or when I was looking back at myself in the mirror. _

_Not until you were there and you made me wonder what was beyond this life. You made me think of love as something permanent, eternal. We are sewn into the very fabric of the universe. If there is me, there is you._

"Death is just a part of the cycle," you once said to me, nights after my father died. You thumbed the crust from beneath my weary eyes and held me calm. "Then there is life again." And I clung to you after that, kept you bound in my arms and legs like chains.

_But why? Why do people have to die? _

_Why are you dying?_

_I am your emergency contact. _

_The call came while I was just getting in the door, soaked to the bone and I could hear you in my ear, nagging me about forgetting my umbrella, about being late for our dinner date. I was going to ignore the call. My finger was halfway to the power button when I felt this tugging. It was like claws digging into my heart, ripping into muscle and meat and pulling. _

_I answered._

_Getting to you was a blur. I don't remember how I got to the hospital. All I know is that I'm standing here, drenched to the insides of my boots, staring at you on the other side of the glass. I insisted on seeing you, told the staff that I was your only family in this city, this state, this country. _

_As I am. _

_I won't leave you. I stare at your body, wet and bare and you look ice-cold as you lay there, motionless. Your blood drips and dribbles to the floor, then it sprays, gushes, red on white and blue and I feel my legs give out beneath me. Someone catches me, holding me up and tugging me away. But I won't leave. I plant my feet and watch every injection, every cut and every movement as the doctors flurry around you. _

_There's so much blood. _

_Why isn't it stopping?_

_Why are you dying? _

_I still don't understand death, nor why it happens. I chalked my father's fate up to karma. But you, sweet, beautiful, wonderful you. My Yuuri. Not you. Karma can't have a thing on you. _

"We can't change what the world throws at us," you spoke into the fine hairs at my nape that same night, cradling me from behind as we laid in a cocoon of blankets, "be it circumstances or fate. So we keep changing, growing. We live despite the uncertainty in life."

"When did you get so wise?" I asked, cracking a smile you couldn't see. For that, I was glad. You would have seen how defeated it was.

"I did a lot of soul searching while we were apart." You trailed your fingers up my bare shoulder, your thoughts traveling along with them. You sighed, brushing your fingers back down my arm with the billow of breath, the touch tingling beneath my skin. "I've been too scared of the world, as unpredictable and cruel as it can be. I haven't allowed myself to see how vibrant it is. If I'm too afraid, how am I going to live, let alone die?"

_There's a hand on my shoulder. It taps, then tugs when I don't acknowledge it. I'm turned to find another person. Their face is nothing but water spots until I blink back my tears. _

_"You're the family of Mr. Kat…sooki?"_

_Your butchered name almost makes me laugh, but it also almost makes me crumble. I look back to see that you're still there. Still fighting to survive. "Yes," I say with the firm tone that leaves no room for argument._

_It's a police officer. The radio at his hip goes off in a static burst before he flicks at it and gestures towards a female officer behind him. The woman steps back, turning away to answer her own radio. Then he holds up your backpack. _

_"That's…Why…?" My tongue feels frayed in my mouth, splitting off into too many questions, lost within too much that is still unsaid. _

_"It was attempted theft turned-" His mouth moves, but I don't hear anything more._

_There's a man beside the female officer. He's handcuffed, but he sits slumped in his chair, practically a lifeless lump. There's blood crusted on his hands, darkening his clothes, and it feels like the coldness of the rain has finally oozed into my pores and frozen my heart. _

_It's your blood, isn't it? The same blood smearing the ER's floors. _

_"_…_I didn't mean to do it… I didn't mean to do it…" It's a mantra that the man repeats, over and over, his glassy eyes half open as he stares far, far away. _

_A full minute passes before I can take all of the man in. _

_I recognize him. My iced-over heart shatters, splintering into glassy shards that cut into my insides. _

_It's my fault._

_All my fault._

_If I hadn't…_

_The officer is still talking._

_"We aren't sure if the stabbing was intentional-"_

_It was._

_"-or if it was the result of a struggle. Does he look at all familiar to you?"_

_Yes._

_I say nothing. The answer curls wickedly beneath my lungs, climbs up my throat. I feel like I'm going to choke at any moment. _

_"With his priors, we think it was a crime of opportunity-"_

_It wasn't. This was because of me. _

_"-but we have to be sure."_

_My hand goes to my side, scratches. I claw at the spot, trying to dig in past my soggy sweater to where red marks fade. _

_I feel a solid warmth on my arm, a hand steadying me. I stop. I expect it to be you. To see your face, adorable frames above a shy smile. Bangs ruffled. A smattering of words transplanted onto your cheek from your hand. Your tag sticking out of your shirt._

_But it's just the officer. _

_"It looks like he was trying to protect this. It was in his hand." _

_The minute I see it, I want to scream. _

_Because this is my fault. _

_There's a commotion in the room. The doors bang open and closed, more hospital staff rushing into your room, a frantic mess. There's more blood than there was before, sliding beneath their shoes, coated on their scrubs. _

_I run back to the glass, won't leave no matter what the nurse says. She tries to pull me away, to take me to the waiting room. _

_But I won't leave you._

_Her nails snag on the collar of my sweater. It pulls tightly beneath my Adam's apple, steals my breath. The fabric rips and I'm in the room, slipping to your side, shoving my way through as I hold onto your hand. My fingers curl against yours, the ring shining on my hand. "See, Yuuri. You can't leave me here." My voice is a quiet rasp, muted by the yelling of orders and the blaring of monitors. _

_Your fingers are limp, freezing cold. I try to warm them with skin, lips, breath. You're ice and I don't know what to do. I try to beg the doctors, ask them, tell them, yell at them because I'll do _anything_ for you to stay. I'll hold you here, never let you go. _

_They're placing paddles on your chest. I'm grabbed and yanked at until I'm finally dragged away. Everyone steps back but a lone doctor that shocks a current into your body._

_I feel my own heart jump with yours. _

_My chest hurts. _

_"No… No, no, no, Yuuri! Stay with me."_

_But you don't respond. _

_It feels like my heart is being compacted, slowly being squeezed of all of its life._

_"Please, Yuuri."_

_My words are only a wheeze, my breathing coming in short puffs and I fall forward out of the arms of whoever's holding me until your gurney is my only support. You're going in and out of focus, like I'm wearing your glasses again. I wish you were awake to scold me. _

_I watch as the doctors slowly move away from you. They're snapping off their gloves, littering the floor. The monitor won't stop screeching. _

_"Please, stay with me…"_

_I don't want you to die._

_"Mr. Nikifor-!"_

_I won't… let go._

_Then there's a whiteness._

* * *

Where am I?

I feel as if I'm drifting, floating along like a cloud on the air. There's this… weightlessness. Like I have no mass, no gravity to tie me down. The world around me is a brilliant blue, the sky on a warm summer day. I can almost feel the sun, see it lancing between buildings, smell the heat on the air, beating on the pavement, spoiling the garbage on the sidewalks.

But there are only clouds. I'm up in the sky, standing on the atmosphere as if it were solid ground. Below me is the city I know so well, my home. The city that once seemed to tower over me, that bared its teeth and claws and kept me feeling so small, is now a bitty cluster of dots. Rooftops now seem connected enough to walk on, and I wonder how it would feel to run across those rooftops, as big as I feel now, and jump right into the expanse of blue.

This is what I imagine invincibility to feel like. I'm one of those heroes in capes and tights that fly around, staring down at the world, waiting to save it.

I never imagined myself the hero. And maybe I'm not. Maybe I'm just a person, mortal, fallible, able to fall and be forgotten. It's the heroes that are celebrated and honored and memorialized. Nobody remembers the names of the people who are saved.

Nobody remembers the names of the people who aren't.

I'm not even a person here. I look down at myself and see nothing. I'm not looking through clear lenses in blue frames. There is no blurred nose or hair strands or eyelashes in my periphery. There are no feet to keep me standing. I have no body.

The shock of it hits me. I panic. Questions are all I have. Where am I? What am I? _Who_ am I?

As if to answer, my surroundings crack, and I worry that I've broken this. This world. This beautiful sky. Bright, crystalline fragments float in the air like translucent diamonds. They drift and shine, refracting rainbows through the clouds. I see nothing in their reflection.

Until images begin to take shape within the crystal shards. I watch, too scared to do much else. Each shard holds its own set of images, scenes playing out before me until they blink into new ones.

It's me. My life. I see my history with brilliant clarity, with a memory that far surpasses the capacity of my brain. I see my beginning (moments of my mother buzzing around the kitchen, me at her side like a tiny duckling - my father and his heavy belly of laughter as he drinks alongside Minako-sensei - me hiding in a pile of towels as my sister counts two rooms away - watching Minako-sensei type in the dark of night until I can no longer keep my head up.) I see the middle (following Minako's steps as I tag along to America - pacing the paths of my massive campus until Yuuko comes along and mercifully guides me to the right building - meeting Phichit during a trying, coffee-drenched study session - long hours at the bookstore as I pray for inspiration to hit like a meteor strike that will drive my writer's block to extinction.)

And then there's my end.

You.

Meeting you. Loving you. Fighting for you.

Dying.

That's right. The images flood through me, wash my mind of the sludge and fog and remind me of what must have happened only moments ago. I realize that I am dying.

Or maybe… I'm already dead.

I guess what they say is true, that your life flashes before your eyes when you die.

But the shards are more clairvoyant than the saying implies. The shards project other scenes, featuring faces I've never seen and places I've never been. It's like I'm watching other lives, yet there's this sensation of recognition. It glimmers in the back of my mind and I keep watching until I understand.

Bit by bit things click into place, like pages being turned in a story. A very familiar story.

_"See, Yuuri. You can't leave me here."_

Your voice cuts through everything, so close that I feel like you're speaking from within my very skin, a part of me.

_"No… No, no, no, Yuuri! Stay with me."_

The agony in your voice makes me ache. I want to say something. I want to shout that I'm right here, right beside you. I do, but I know that you can't hear me.

After all, I don't have a voice.

_"Please, Yuuri."_

It's like I'm being stabbed again, slashed into by the desperation in your words, and I can do nothing to stop it.

I want to cry.

I want to grab you and never let go.

But I'm dying.

I have to let go.

My emotions swell up until they are all that I am, bleeding from me as you speak to defy what's happening. The regret, the sorrow, the panic, the fear, everything inside of me makes me want to lash out, fight, _stay_.

But I'm only a presence here. I have no power to defy death.

_"Please, stay with me…"_

"I want to stay with you, Viktor!"

The words echo around me, and I realize that I now have a voice. A mouth to speak through. I look down at myself and see hands, a torso, feet.

I look up and there you are.

It's always one surprise after another with you.

You're smiling. We're facing death and you're smiling through the tears that flood the seams of your eyes. "I didn't know if you were going to see me in time."

I feel your smile on my own face, through my own tears. I grab onto you, hold you close and don't let go. "How could I ever not see you, you with a soul as vibrant as a sunrise?" For some reason, this makes you cry harder into my hair, grasping at me like it's the last time you will ever get to.

I suppose that's true.

Your hands move along my arms, from elbows to hands, to my hips, to the ends of my jacket.

The jacket you tossed in my face on your way out the door, yelling that it broadened my shoulders and was capable of making you swoon.

The jacket I was wearing through the chill that persisted on winter's last breaths, with the hood I put up to protect me from the rain.

I remember the hood covering half of my face, breathing against the wall, up on my toes, searching fingers, a roaring rage-

The slice of a knife, choking, slipping your ring from my pocket and out of its box, squeezing it so hard in my palm that it burrowed its way into my skin-

I pull myself from those last moments, knowing that if I linger I will be swallowed, fall somewhere beyond your grasp. I focus instead on you.

"But what happened, Yuuri!" you ask, mouth pulled tight as your hand presses between my ribs. Your eyes are all over the place, flitting over my body like you're looking at some horrific scene and trying to find the cause. "You were stabbed! Why? Where were you? W-Why was _he _there? Did he do this to you? Please, please tell me-"

"It was my book," I say, talking over your rushed sentences that are nothing but scrambled thoughts. I can feel your presence being pulled away. You're slipping through my hands like water and we don't have time.

"What?" You know it, too. I can feel it in how you're trembling fingers clench against my chest, see it in your eyes that dig deep into me, searching for answers, for a trapdoor with a thread to pull for escape.

"It was my book that you fell in love with. It was my book that brought us together. It didn't come to me until I died. Until I was standing here on the other side, watching these shards, that I remembered our lives together."

You glance around frantically, only now seeing the pieces glimmering around us. You watch for mere moments, but I see recognition swallow your irises.

"I wrote it. During our last life together."

Your head whips back and our eyes meet. You hold onto my hands, but you're still slipping away. Back to where you belong. The world is still moving. Turning beneath me. Without me.

"We'll meet again. In the next life."

I'm ready to go, I think, because I got to say goodbye, but it's not really goodbye. We'll have another chance, a lifetime, more lifetimes, to be together. In the shallows of my heart, I believe this is simply yet another beginning for us, but deep in its roots I weep for our future in the here and now. I want to know how we would have fared, how far we would have gone together, if you would have said yes.

I lop off those sentiments as if trimming away split ends. I face forward to new lives. If I look back, I may break.

But you dig your hands into me with more force than you ever have, with more force than you should be able to use as you continue slip back into the real world.

"No. You can't leave me, Yuuri. I don't care if we have a next life. I want now! I want you in _this_ lifetime." You kiss me and it's the gentlest sensation, like a secret whispered on a breeze, but it's also full of more love than I'm prepared for. It's a strong gust of all that you are, and you are so much. "We live together or we die together," you say as we break apart and you sound so strong, saying a line like some hero come to sacrifice their life for love.

You're not adorned in a cape or tights, but you've always had your own brand of invincibility.

"Viktor…"

"Besides, I'm too young to be a widow." You wink and a snort escapes me because it is so you. And then your strong voice cracks. "I l_ove_ you too much for you to die."

You fade away until you're gone.

I long for you, for your love, your guidance, your certainty, your defiance towards the rules of life and death and this planet.

_"I'm Viktor. I'm an artist who paints because it's the only way that I can get my emotions out. It's how I communicate. It's how I live."_

I don't want another life.

_"I can never stop. Just like I can never stop loving you."_

I want this one.

* * *

The shock of waking from near-death is less explosive than I would have expected. Instead of gulping in air like a fish out of water, instead of jolting up, eyes wide and heart pounding with excitement, instead of startled eyes staring back at me and monitors shrieking at the moment of unrest, there is a muted quality to everything. I wake from this as I would from any other sleep. Soundlessly blinking the night from my eyes and reaching for my glasses.

But my glasses aren't there.

My surroundings are full of mismatched, obscure shapes, but I know where I am. I know what I've come back from. Elation inflates with my lungs. I'm alive. I've managed to come back, to this lifetime, to you.

I have to find you.

I try to sit up, but I feel something tearing, a pain that steals the breath from my lungs and makes me instantly recoil. I clench the gown over my chest, face contorting. There's a startled noise from beyond me, and I blink over at the shape of a person near the door.

"Ah! You're awake. I'll get-"

"Can you…" the words sound as if they've been scraped from the back of my throat and feel even more so. I blink a few times, but the person seems to get the picture.

"One moment." There's some rustling before my glasses are placed on my nose. A sense of security settles in my stomach. There's me. My hands. My body. The hospital room. This woman.

Dark brown hair is pulled back in a haphazard ponytail. Tiredness tugs at her eyelids, droops her cheeks. She's small, swallowed by the green scrubs on her thin frame. She smells like daises, but the hospital's pervasive scent of bitter disinfectant seems to have stained into her.

"I'm your nurse," she says before I can ask, smiling primly, a bit of hesitance behind her own thin frames. "I'll get your doctor."

I reach for her hand, but she jerks from my touch. It's so sudden that it throws me for a moment, but the question has already formed. "Where's Viktor?"

There's a sharp intake of air. Her eyes cut over to the other half of my room. I follow her glance. You're in a bed beside me, tethered down with your own medical cords.

"But… what…"

_Why_?! Why are you here, too? What happened?

I look back at the nurse, the one who treats me like some kind of germ, with the question on my tongue. Her features are tight, creased with apprehension, but she sighs, softens. "We thought you were both goners." Her lips curl against her teeth, and she looks to be rethinking her words. "Some call it broken heart syndrome, we call it stress cardiomyopathy. Simply, you died, Mr. Katsuki-"

"Yuuri," I interrupt, because I've never taken to such a formal address and because I don't think I'm fully comprehending all of this.

"Yuuri," she tries, attempting another smile that stretches thin lips a bit too wide. "For a full seven minutes and forty-two point two seconds you were dead. Mr. Nikiforov's heart… we think the stress of your… _death_ affected his heart rhythms and…"

I did this to you?

She searches my eyes and I want to reach for you. I want you to be okay. I'm surprised when her hand cups mine, and again when I find that her hand, her tiny hand that's held lives - our lives - is shaking.

"I'm so very sorry. It's just that it's not every day that you see someone come back to life. Not from that." She stares at my chest, and I know that she's seeing what's under my gown, the hole now sutured back together. "Mr. Nikiforov will be fine. He did die for a time…" She makes a face, because that sounds weird, wrong, so wrong, and she knows it. "His heart gave out nearly a minute after yours, but we brought him back. It was miraculous, if I can say that as a person in the medical field. I've never believed in miracles, but the second his monitor beeped with signs of life… you responded."

You don't wake through any of the rest of the nurse's explanation, or as the doctor's and surgeons come in for tests and check-ups, or as the detectives arrive for a statement. But you're a presence. As long as you're here, breathing beside me, I will myself strong.

I'm not allowed out of my bed, but I get them to move you closer to me. I'm not content until I can hold your hand in mine. Feel your warmth, skin moving over knuckles, tracing the paths of your veins and the spirals of your pale fingertips.

The ring on your hand.

_"I snuck the ring back on his finger," the nurse whispered, giving me a thumbs up when all was wrapped up for the night. _

_"Technically, it's evidence," the detective remarked on his way out, "but for now it's where it belongs," he finished, waving it off as he pulled out a cigarette._

_"You can't smoke in here!" the nurse had whisper-screeched, smacking it out of his hand._

"You're missing all of the excitement, Viktor." I'm on my side, brushing your hair from your face. The movement stings, tugs on the needle and tubes in my arm and it feels like I'm trying to wrench a leech free from my skin. But I want to do this. I want to watch you do it. I want to watch you hold a brush as you spray paint across our apartment, everywhere, to the spots that the canvas cloths can't catch.

And to think… I could have lost this… All that we have in this life…

It's like being a ghost and coming back into a dead body. I know far too much for a lifetime. My soul feels different, older, but I feel closer to you. I know just how intertwined our souls are, how right we are for each other.

I'm reminded of your painting yet again. Maybe the colors, blended and intertwined, could represent souls. Our souls and the others we are destined to touch. Instead of an enduring will of sadness, it could be the endurance of something much stronger and starker than that.

Love.

"I don't ever want to lose this."

"Good," you grip onto my other hand that was listlessly petting your fingers, open your eyes and look at me under hooded lids, "because you're not going anywhere."

It's after a lot of hugs, tears, and tangled medical cords that I manage to lay beside you, squeezed together on your tiny hospital bed. I'm not supposed to move, but I can't manage to care. The meds are still managing most of the pain and all I want is to be close to you. I put my head on your chest, make sure that your heart is still there, still beating. My hand massages over the back of yours, over your fingers, but always straying away from the ring on your finger.

"It was my fault, wasn't it?"

"No," I insist with a jolt. The movement is like taking a stake to the chest and I have to breathe through the pain. "None of it was your fault."

"But he's…"

"Coincidence. It's a difficult thing to accept, I know… but I was just a victim of opportunity. He…" The pain in my chest flares, and flashes of the attack still remain in my peripheries, stalking the outskirts of my mind, but I manage. "…He didn't mean to stab me. I honestly believe that." I remember his face contorting with an emotion I couldn't name, his hands and their frenzied movements as he tried to stop the bleeding, his tears, his voice, shaky and croaking, as he called 911. "So do the detectives, so…"

Your eyes, bleak and rimmed purple, glance down at the ring, thumb swiveling around it. "You were there for me. For this."

"I think we should blame Phichit for that," I say with a chuckle, reminding myself to call him and tell him about this. And Yuuko and Minako and my family. Your mom, if you want, though I'm sure you won't. "And myself for not being more careful."

"But Yuuri."

"But nothing. If you're to blame for this then does that mean that I should take the blame for your almost, practically, might as well have been heart attack?"

"Never." You tug on my gown, and I get closer still, ignoring the sting. You're careful of my chest, kissing the perimeter around my wound and up to my mouth.

I look at the ring on your hand. "It wasn't the most elegant way to propose, but…" I clench my fist around the bandage covering my palm, and although I'm sure the nurse washed and sanitized the ring thoroughly before returning it, I imagine my blood dulling its shine. My words seize in my throat again, caught this time behind a new enemy.

You grin, wide and goofy. "It was definitely dramatic."

"Dramatic," I mutter out of the corner of my mouth. "Yeah, not the word that I would use."

"You _died_ for me," you say, admiring the ring as you hold your bejeweled hand out and away from you. "Bet the nurses and doctors are all jealous."

"…Does that mean you have an answer for me?"

"Depends. Do you have a question?"

Typical, I think, and I roll my eyes. "Nope. Never mind. I'll go ask one of those nurses or doctors instead." I turn away, giving you the cold shoulder, though I can't stop smiling.

"Hey! H-Hey, wait! I was just kidding, Yuuri. Come on, ask me."

"Nope. No, thank you."

"Yuuri~!"

You keep begging into the night, but I'll make you wait for it.

Because we have nothing but time.

We have a lifetime together.

And then some.


	8. I waited for you

**A/N: Thank you to everyone who read, followed and favorited. This is the end, a little epilogue of sorts. Let me know what you think!**

* * *

It was difficult at first, moving forward when we knew so much of our past selves. There were times where we had nightmares of things that couldn't be possible, not in this life. Certain memories seemed etched into our bones and were hard to erase. My deaths and yours were equally powerful, and some mornings we had phantom pains that were intolerable. I would wake with what felt like deep, welting bruises around my neck and I couldn't catch my breath for minutes, or I would jump awake with the brightness of lights stained into my eyes, the bones beneath my skin aching in a way that they never had before. You're memories toyed with you in the middle of the day, and sometimes you would let out a startled yell, dropping a brush or a plate and holding a limb like it had just been lost to you.

We carried with us haunting moments that dogged our footsteps like creatures of the night. There was no antidote for them, no sword to smite the evil away. I wrote some of our memories out in a journal that would never be published, and let others be swept back into the running script of history.

And then there were the memories of others.

Together we shared an unknown brand of sorrow, remembering people that were not restrung into our lives this time around. Some acquaintances, friends, even family. Some ties only stretched so far, it seemed. It left us frightful, wondering if those close to us now would not be carried over with us later. I wondered if I would lose my family or Yuuko or Takeshi or Phichit or Minako or even J.J. I know you worried over Mila and Chris and even that fledgling graffiti artist you ended up taking under your wing.

Mostly, we worried that there would come a time when our love wouldn't be strong enough and we, too, would be separated.

We kept moving forward, as much as we could. We clung to each other, to those around us, and focused on the life we had left to live and enjoy. Books to write. Art to paint. Family to see. Family to forgive. Friendships to strengthen. Friendships to forge.

A family to create.

We forgot other lives in time, until all we were certain of was that we are destined, and that we will share this love with other lives. We were wakened back into our own time and we knew then why it was that we forgot.

We aren't meant to carry other lives on our backs. One lifetime is enough.

I think back on it now as I sit out on the front porch, rocking forward and back, forward and back. My gnarled, arthritic fingers turn through the pages of our life together, pressed into history not only through words bound in a book, but kept forever in my soul. I sit beside Takeshi, watching his and Yuuko's grandchildren play like I used to with my sister. We share stories like we haven't always been a part of each other's lives since we were in our twenties, decades ago. He talks about Yuuko, tears in the corners of his eyes, sniffling, and I remember her bright smile, her gorgeous eyes, that straightforward nature that kept me in line. And I talk about you, my face and chest tight, fingers stumbling along pages, as I remember you.

I remember you laughing and yelling and crying, drunk in my bookstore.

I remember our first kiss, tasting of a fine blend of skittles and sprite.

I remember your paint-splattered shirts and pants and skirts.

I remember nights on the fire escape, and eating brownie batter on the couch, and crying at your door with a sticky note tucked against my palm.

I remember laying with you in a hospital bed as you begged me to propose until I finally caved.

I remember so, so much.

Three years have passed since you've gone, each year crawling by slower than the last. "_We live together, or we die together_," you said. But here I am, living without you, you hypocrite. I remember the day you left me, your ailing body lying in bed, a brush still between your fingers even as you were too weak to lift it. You told me to finish my story, wash out my grief with the thoughts I still had left to share. I could never wash away my grief of you, but I have finished.

My final tale.

I read you this, our story, written with my words mixed in with a sprinkling of yours, before it was finished. It took me months to finish it after you died. I didn't want to end this. End us. It was a conclusion I never wanted to reach.

It took me too long to realize, but we aren't over yet. This story has reached its finale, but we will have more stories.

More love.

Axel's youngest daughter cuts right into our conversation, wanting to show Takeshi a beetle she found. He laughs, gets up and his chair creaks about as much as his knees do, but he follows, delving right into the huddled circle of his grandchildren. In the dying rays of sunlight, I close my eyes. The quiet evening breathes against my face. The wind plays a trick on me, thick with the scent of paint and pine.

I open my eyes

And you're there.

Your hair is long and you're in those black overalls, a pencil clipped into the strap and your smile as vibrant as the day we met. "I waited for you," you say, and I shiver at the sound of your voice.

"Yes, you did." You hold your hand out to me and I grasp it, bouncing up and out of my chair and into your embrace. Shards of our life float around us, ready to disappear and be replaced with the pieces of a new life. A new journey for us to take.

Together.

"That was just one of our lifetimes." You gaze into the flashes of moments and they reflect in your eyes. "It was a perfect one."

I regret none of it. I'm no longer afraid of the future, of starting over. I know that I will find you.

"Imagine the next."

* * *

"Viktor, are you wearing my glasses again?!" I ask from the next room, head ducked under couch cushions as I search through old pennies and crumbs and… I'm not sure what that is. "If I have to check this couch one more time-"

"Maaaaayyyybeee~"

"Viktor!" I trudge into the bedroom, crossing my arms as I come to find you kicked back against the pillows, my glasses low on your nose as you read that book – always _that_ book - over the rims.

You raise a brow, grin wide, but you don't look at me. You turn the page. "I'll stop when you stop secretly trying on my trench coats."

I scoff, but it may actually be something of a sputter. "That was one time! And don't pretend like you didn't like it. You wouldn't let me take it off!"

Your smile curls like a Cheshire. My stomach takes the cue to sink to my toes. You take off my glasses, twirl them around in a circle, and glance off to the side like you're thinking. Enjoying this, more like. Then you point them at me. "Tell you what, I'll let you keep _one_ coat."

"Who said I want one?" I attempt to nab my glasses, but you're quick to twirl them away and I end up falling forward into your lap.

"For a price."

"So I'm bartering for it now?" I huff, lifting myself up.

"You just have to agree to wear nothing else under it."

Flames lick at the insides of my cheeks and now I full on sputter, "Wha-?! Y-You weirdo. Will you just give me back my glasses? I have to finish this page when everything's fresh in my head."

You whine, put out as you blow your bangs from your face and hold my glasses out for me. I snatch them away, slumping back into my desk chair. My laptop is open, a blank white screen staring back at me. Every word I was ready to write flees from me the second my fingers touch the keys. "Who said that me writing an autobiography was a good idea?"

"I did." You reply in my ear, suddenly behind me. You reach over my shoulders, cheek brushing mine, and type something out. "It will be a story that future generations of skaters will read and be inspired by."

"Yeah. I'm so inspirational."

It has a title now, _Yuri on Ice_. It sounds egotistical and I'm tempted to backspace it away, but so does the idea of an autobiography in the first place.

"Who knows? Maybe it will be something that we'll read in our future lives."

My writing session leaves my brain feeling battered and bruised and my pride somewhat defeated. But it stirs something inside of me. It feels cliché to call it inspiration, even worse to name it destiny, but it sits in my chest like it's something right.

I can tell my story.

And maybe someone will read it.

I get up and change. I grab my bag, leash Makkachin and check the clock. You're still reading.

"Come on," I say, rolling up your newspaper and swatting you on the knee with it. "Put that book down. We have practice."

"_Nooooo_." It's a nasally whine, one I don't take seriously in the slightest. I don't even look at you. I'm too busy packing up _your_ bag. "It's my favorite. I'll never put it down."

"Do you have any idea how many times you've read this." I pick it up, scan the cover and toss it away. Sounds like some cheesy romance novel to me.

"I could read it a thousand times and never get tired of it."

"Yeah. Yeah. Let's go."

You join me at the entrance when you're finally dressed and you snatch up your keys from off the wall. "I love you," you chirp.

"And I love you," I answer as you tug me close.

You slip in a quick kiss and a whisper that I can't quite hear.

"_As you are._"

"What?"

But you're already halfway out the door, Makkachin trailing behind you. "Nothing!"

I sigh, bemused. I look over at the book now tossed onto the couch. I think that maybe I'll take the time to read it one of these days… I thumb over the title, and that same feeling from earlier lights up inside of my chest. It's a curious thing, but before I can think on it you're leaning back in the door, tossing out a "Who's the slowpoke now?"

"You. You always are."

"Hey, I am who I am."

Yes.

Yes, you are.


End file.
